Aglaia Konrad

Austrian-born photographer and artist, born in 1960 in Salzburg and long based in Brussels.^*1*2*3*4

Known for extensive photographic research on architecture, quarries, modernist structures, and urban intensities, often presented through books, installations, and spatial interventions.^*1*2*3*4

Main themes: architecture, urban expansion, extraction sites, modernism, built space, archival accumulation, and the relation between photography and exhibition space.^*1*2*3

Representative work examples: projects around quarries, *Japan Works*, and exhibitions such as *From A to K* and *Umbau* are central because they show how Konrad uses photography not simply to depict architecture but to think through how architecture circulates as image, archive, and spatial experience.^*1*2*3

Technique / formal traits: analogue 35mm photography, extensive on-site research, accumulation of large archives, blown-up photocopies or silkscreens, artist books, and installation strategies that make the photograph act physically within space. Argos’s *Elasticity* presentation is useful here because it specifically notes repetition, mirroring, enlargement, and collage as recurring transformations of urban imagery.^*1*2*3

Why this method was chosen: Konrad’s work depends on repetition, travel, and accumulation. Photography allows her to gather and reorganize built environments across locations while also testing how architecture changes once it is translated into walls, books, and display structures. The USI exhibition text is especially helpful because it frames this as a negotiation between subject and exhibition space rather than straightforward record.^*1*2*4

Historical context: her work emerges in the late twentieth century alongside growing interest in architecture photography, urban research, and postindustrial visual culture. Unlike more neutral documentarians, Konrad pushes photography toward installation and sculptural encounter.^*1*2*3

Relation to contemporaries or movements: she is often discussed with architectural photographers and image-archive artists, but differs by insisting on the exhibition space as part of the work. Her photographs do not simply record buildings; they negotiate with walls, surfaces, and circulation.^*1*2*3

Historical significance: Konrad matters because she widened architectural photography into a research-based and spatially adaptive practice, showing that photographs of buildings can become material operations within contemporary art rather than static depictions alone.^*1*2*3*4

Critical meaning: the work matters because it treats architecture as a moving field of extraction, planning, and display. Photography becomes a way to think with buildings and sites, not just about them.^*1*2

Where and how the work was used: Konrad’s work circulated through museums, architecture-related exhibitions, artist books, and site-specific installations. M Leuven’s retrospective dossier, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen’s comparative exhibition with Armin Linke, and the USI/Teatro dell’architettura exhibition are especially useful because they connect her archive-based method to larger questions about the specificity, materiality, and exhibition choreography of photography.^*1*2*4

M Leuven’s retrospective framing is useful because it emphasizes both the long-term consistency of Konrad’s subjects and the way her photographs are inseparable from exhibition-making and publication.^*1

Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen’s comparison with Armin Linke clarifies how strongly reception has focused on her archive logic and on photography’s ability to stage architectural complexity rather than merely register it.^*2

The USI exhibition text strengthens this reception by explicitly saying that the exhibition questions photography’s documentary function and its status as a two-dimensional image, which is central to how Konrad’s work has been understood institutionally.^*4

Later press materials repeatedly stress that she questions the two-dimensionality of photography itself, which is a key part of her historical significance.^*2*3*4