Erieta Attali’s photographic projects develop over long committed years and through many, many images. Yet for this, her second exhibition at the Byzantine Museum, she has distilled the profound dialogue she entertains with architecture into a selection of fifteen photographs. These are images of layered perceptions that capture the very essence of her approach to architecture and photography as complementary experiences of shifting opticality.
Unlike commercial photography produced on deadline to document a recently completed building captured as a designed object, Attali’s art is born of a sustained relationship with the entire body of work of a single designer attempting always to capture the very essence of the atmospheres that recur from work to work. Of the handful of relationships that Attali has honed in well over a quarter century as a photographer, none has been more reciprocal than that with the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. For the melding of designed space and environment is the objective of both architect and photographer.
In his combinations of the engineering feat of huge planes of glass with innovative interpretations of traditional Japanese wooden architecture, Kengo crafts spaces that fluctuate visually and experientially in the changing valences of natural settings. His works have an almost preternatural resonance with Attali’s photographic practice. Through the glass lenses of her analog cameras she seeks to capture the interpenetration of found and manmade environments, merging hard and reflected surfaces into layered images that record atmosphere as the very substance of the art of Kuma’s architecture.
It is no surprise that Attali remembers her first encounter with Kuma’s work at the turn of the millennium as a powerful moment of elective affinity. Ironically enough she had first seen Kuma’s work through the medium of another photographer’s image, an image of the architect’s seminal early work the Water/Glass House in Atami, Japan. In that building vacillating transparency and opacity became the veritable building blocks of architecture even as recording them transformed Attali’s photographic sensibility. The encounter with the building at first hand on a trip to Japan in 2001 was a powerful moment of elective affinity. Captivated by the sense that in Kuma’s work she had found the modern architectural equivalent of the relationship between setting and building, landscape and architecture, she had been exploring in years of photography of archaeological sites, Attali experienced Kuma’s work as a turning point, focusing her lens on the insertion of the new into ancient settings. As she recounts in a revealing interview with historian/critic Ariel Genandt, the encounter was transformative: “What fascinated me in the Water/Glass House was that the building is experienced like atmospheric conditions: when inside it, one feels part of the landscape…. My encounter with the house … helped me crystalize a particular photographic notion where architecture and landscape are continuous.”
It is one of the great myths of avant-garde glass and steel architecture that glass disappears allowing a total transparency in which the eye occupies the interior long before the body might follow. Already as one of Kuma’s heroes, the German avant garde pioneer Mies van der Rohe realized in radical unrealized designs for all glass skyscrapers in 1920s Berlin, glass changes continually from near total transparency to nearly black opacity, with every nuance of reflectivity and translucency in between. Kuma’s architecture has developed in making these very vacillations into the veritable building blocks of an architecture in which the crafting of atmosphere, the staging of light effects, the merging with nature as fundamental as the choice of materials and the solution of engineering issues. But it is precisely the qualities shared by Kuma’s and Attali’s palettes that render these photographs all the more complex, as Attali patiently builds through her lens the very experiences that Kuma stages in construction of ephemeral atmospheres through engineered glass and timber.
Exhibition Text: Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, NYC.
Exhibition Design: Tasos Roidis, Architect, Assistant Professor, TUM, Munich.
Title
Woodscapes | Erieta Attali on Kengo KumaType
ExhibitionOrganizers
Byzantine & Christian MuseumFrom
June 15, 2023 08:00 AMUntil
October 31, 2023 08:00 PMVenue
Byzantine & Christian MuseumAddress