LUMIAR CITÉ

Aglaia Konrad

FRAUENZIMMERSTUNDE

18.11.2017 - 14.01.2018

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The word Frauenzimmerstunde is a typical German combination of more than two words, namely Frauen, Zimmer and Stunde, as well as Frauenzimmer and Zimmerstunde. The first three words mean ‘women’, ‘room’ and ‘hour’, while the last two are combinations themselves; Frauenzimmer is a term that literally means ‘women’s room’. It was used in Scandinavian and Germanic countries in the fifteenth century for the actual chambers in a queen’s household, and including all people who worked within them. From the seventeenth century onwards the term was also used in relation to individual women, but after the suffragette movement around the turn of the twentieth century Frauenzimmer became a pejorative term. Zimmerstunde in turn is an old Austrian-German term for the daily hour during which a hotel chambermaid could retire to her own room in the attic.

Aglaia Konrad’s first solo exhibition in Portugal transforms the Lumiar Cité space into a Frauenzimmer, which engages with the gallery’s history of architectural interventions by Konrad’s predominantly male artist colleagues. Frauenzimmer constitutes a backdrop for her photography work that captures man-made spaces – from quarries to the urban intensities of architecture and constructions, with their inherent materiality as well as notions of the monumental in architecture and in photography itself. Having developed an idiosyncratic style that allows the artist to trigger subtle psychological resonances through her juxtaposition of images and the social and the political in the situations encountered, Konrad undermines the formal, iconographic photography of architecture.

To coincide with her exhibition, and in collaboration with Roma Publications in Amsterdam, Aglaia Konrad will be launching her artist’s book SCHAUBUCH: Skulptur, in which she presents photographs taken between 2010 and 2017 in museums throughout Europe, featuring sculptures from different times and contexts within their museological presentations.

Aglaia Konrad (Austria, 1960) lives and works in Brussels. She teaches at the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels. Her work has been presented widely around the world at museums and biennials among them ‘The Brutalism Appreciation Society’, Hardware Medienkunstverein (Dortmund, 2017), ‘EMINENT DOMAINS (proper names)’, Robert Miller Gallery (New York, 2015), ‘Hollein’, MAK (Vienna, 2014), ‘In the First Circle’, Antoni Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona, 2011), ‘Gazes of Architecture on the Body’, Tokyo Wonder Site and Museum of Contemporary Art (Kumamoto, 2010), Shanghai Biennale (2000), ‘Cities on the Move’ (Bordeaux, New York, London, Helsinki, Vienna, 1998/99) and documenta X (Kassel, 1997). Notable solo exhibitions include ‘From A to K’, M-Museum Leuven (2016), ‘Das Haus (ausgestellt)’, Fotohof (Salzburg, 2014), ‘Apparent Positions – Aglaia Konrad: Concrete and Samples’, Sainsbury Gallery (Norwich, 2012), ‘Concrete and Samples’, with Armin Linke, Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, 2009). Her artist’s books include ‘SCHAUBUCH: Skulptur’ (2017), ‘Aglaia Konrad: From A to K’ (2016), ‘Zweimal Belichtet’ (2013), ‘Carrara’ (2011), ‘Desert Cities’ (2008), ‘Iconocity’ (2005) and ‘Elasticity’ (2002).