Aglaia Konrad participe à l’exposition Moments, part de la  SEFO Triennale 2024 au Olomouc Museum of Art en Tchéquie, centre-nord de la Moravie. 

The SEFO 2024 Triennial is a continuation of the first edition, which took place in 2021 and was subtitled UNIVERSUM. Its aim was to search for and examine possible connections and fixed points in the structure of the world we live in. The general validity of the temporal and spatial dimension of UNIVERSUM is concretised in the SEFO 2024 Triennial, whereby time and space are grasped through art-historical categories. We observe art, architecture, and their environments in real time, but with an emphasis on the modes of historicity and interpretive frameworks that are, or have been, attributed to them.

The timeline in retrospect and in prospects for the future offers many MOMENTS when the fixed points that are chosen, analysed, and named lose their validity and stability, when they undergo a change of perception, acceptance, or even crisis. The objects we focus on in the SEFO 2024 Triennial are represented by a set of terms borrowed from the art historian, theorist, and curator Octavian Eşanu. His triad Monument-Document-Mockument is adapted and measured in the Triennial concept by the current concept of the moment.

MOMENTS do not represent only impermanent points on the timeline for us, they also allow us to explore and compare experiences, long processes, and critical turns. The Triennial wants to work with those moments when we touch our own history and memory and when we construct their image through art and architecture.

Rück-bau [building back], an obvious euphemism in German for demolition, is brought into relation with the growth of crystals, Kristalle, through the cutting of building or renovation debris into crystalline form and so, consequently, leaving open any questions concerning the material’s original matrix, whether social or geological.

… in which it is told that Cronus ate his four children in fear of their overthrowing him as he had his own father. In vengeance, Cronus’ wife Rhea tricked him into swallowing a huge rock instead of his newborn son Zeus, whom she arranged to be taken to safety. On his return, Zeus killed Cronus by forcing him to vomit up the rock and, with it, his four siblings. Zeus then erected the rock as a monument, and it became the first recorded trace of architecture in the history of mythology and mankind.

In light of this myth about the birth of architecture, RÜCKBAUKRISTALLE [building-back-crystals] can be seen as a reversal-demolition’s puked-out debris giving birth to crystalline form in revenge for architectural violence.

Rück-bau is not just an advocacy of Aglaia´s personal fascination for demolition as a brutal force. Her (photographic) practice dealing with architecture, urban space and infrastructure has sharpened her eye for all its inherent “works” that are associated with planning, building, shaping & de-construction.

The reverse process of demolishing existing architecture requires adequate resources and power. I Love Rückbau is a video shot during the demolition of the BNP Fortis bank in Brussels, but it could have been taken from anywhere, just like the torsos of the buildings we see in the exhibition. The crystalline form of waste is transformed into a new quality and a new value. The artist gives us a glimpse of it thanks to the polished, honed surface of the edges and corners. They mirror and glitter just like the precious primary materials of the primary monuments. Whether ancient temples or modern architecture.  In her rendering they are small monuments of our materialized memory.