Lucia Koch & Veronika Kellndorfer participate in Fabrication and Fiction at MAAT in Lisbon

March 20, 2019

Congratulations to Lucia Koch and Veronika Kellndorfer on their participation in Fiction and Fabrication at MAAT in Lisbon. The exhibition gathers 47 artists who build and manipulate images of architectural objects and spaces. Marking 30 years since Photoshop was invented, and digital tools invaded photographic production, this exhibition focuses on the imagery of architecture as a central theme to an expanded practice of photography in contemporary art. The show offers a panorama of architectural photography that evades objective approaches and favors fictionalized takes on reality between cinematic gazes, image deconstruction and more politicized narratives. At a time when digital tools preside over the making of architectural images for media consumption, fictions stemming from the art world appear here as a critical alternative that questions and expands the concept of architecture.

Kellndorfer focuses on the intimate details of windows and reflections and how they reveal the ephemeral nature of seeing, as well as the subjectivity of space. From her series Tropical Modernism, Kellndorfer‘s Stilted House examines Lina Bo Bardi’s emblematic home, Casa de Vidro in São Paulo. The work is composed of semi-transparent silk-screen printed on glass panels mounted on concrete columns. Oscillating between painting, sculpture, photography and architecture the work becomes part of the environment, generating architecture within the space.

Koch will present a continuation of her Fundos series: photographs of the interiors of empty boxes, bags, and packages, manipulated to house and reflect light and mimic architectural scales. Koch began photographing for the Fundos series in 2001 while reading Paul Auster’s dystopian novel, In the Country of Last Things, which tells the story of a collapsed society with no economy or industry, in which the population must resort to selling scavenged, nearly forgotten objects to survive. In this collection of photographs, Koch explores the feeling of vacuity when objects become obsolete and only their negative space is left behind. The result is a series of disorienting portals that hint at the inevitable downfall of a materialistic society.

The exhibition runs from March 20 — August 19, 2019