For over four decades Irmel Kamp has been photographing architecture, conducting long-term research projects focused on a single style or region. The current exhibition presents a selection from two of her most substantial bodies of work: Modern Architecture in Tel-Aviv 1930-1939, is the result of a five-year research encompassing more than 600 buildings, realized by Kamp between 1987-1993, prior to the large-scale preservation efforts of the city and to UNESCO’s recognition of it as a world heritage site in 2003; The second project, Les Années Trente, realized between 1996-1997, revolves around modern architecture of the 1930s in Brussels. Both compose an archeology of sorts of a local “International Style”. Rather than depicting “machines for living in” – Le Corbusier’s seminal maxim – the buildings in Irmel Kamp’s photographs are distinctly “lived-in” and not quite so mechanic, imbued with a sense of place and time and a poetics of presence.

“Back in 1977, a New Mexico judge named Jack Love was reading the funny pages when he came across a Spider-Man comic strip, in which the nefarious Kingpin used a bracelet to track the wall crawler’s whereabouts.” (The Esquire, 2007)
This anecdote about the implementation of electronic tagging – though historically of little importance – illustrates the inextricable link between reality and fiction: a perfect point of departure for Laetitia Gendre, as the main focus of her work is to be found in the friction between the space of the image and the space of the real.

with works by Brian O’Doherty, Joachim Bandau, Kasper Andreasen, Cyrill Lachauer and Dirk Braeckman.

In terms of their form, Joachim Bandau’s bunker drawings are both surprising and fascinating. Conceived as a “survival machine”, as both foxhole and firing range, the bunker in Bandau’s drawings is more than a prototype of instrumental architecture. It appears as a contradictory hybrid, archaic and yet modern. In reality a kind of fortification, Bandau’s bunkers are like sculptures with strange anthropomorphic features.