In her photographic work Austrian Aglaia Konrad has developed a distinctive way of documenting global urbanization. Her archive contains thousands of pictures concerning infrastructure and architecture, an almost unlimited collection that elucidates the relationship between society and place. The pictures allow the viewer to participate in a scenario where the dividing-lines between the old and the new, between architecture, nature, power and symbols are fluid.
In Shaping Stones she juxtaposes found and created architecture, anonymous buildings with familiar ones, and ruins from antiquity with modern archaeological excavations. By formally equating opposites she opens the eyes of the viewer to an existential, timeless world. From plinths to column fragments and capitals – in a museum-like cross-section of many of the stones depicted by Konrad. [LU1] In sober black-and-white, antique fragments and stone typologies from scientific museums share vertical standing room with the naked surfaces of modernist concrete architecture. Elsewhere constructional elements in stone appear as a dense, sculptural cowl with a prismatic effect. Individual stones totter and tower above us in an interaction with the overall collage composition of the pamphlet. The immobility of the stone, its static, ponderous associations, stands in contrast to this flexible principle.
