Fascinated by German architect Bruno Taut’s (1880-1938) ground-breaking style of cross-cultural architecture, Klenz’s work focuses on his Hyuga Villa in Japan. By incorporating traditional Japanese design elements, Taut critiqued euro-centric ideals of modernist architecture and its supposed universal models and principles. In exploring Taut’s place-sensitive building, Klenz asks us to consider how architecture can better reflect local cultures, environments and contexts.
Expanding on this, Klenz constructs multi-layered works combining elements of the Hyuga Villa with archive material of the wunderpus octopus, an animal which, like Taut, strives to reflect its surroundings. This is woven with imagery of traditional Japanese joinery as well as ink marbling and lacquer painting techniques. In combining these elements, Klenz echoes Taut by breaking with the conventions of architectural photography. Together these different artistic techniques and visual metaphors ask the viewer to consider not only the image, but the accumulation of ideas behind it.
Steffi Klenz is an artist based in London who approaches photography as an expanded visual discipline. Her practice is fundamentally concerned with challenging conventional conceptions of architectural representation. Unlike conventional architectural photography, which uncritically flatters its architectural subject matter, Klenz revisits the capacities of the photographic image and architecture to go beyond containing and reproducing the built environment but instead her work bridges the gap between the flat surface of the photograph and the spatial experience of architecture.
Klenz takes great care in finding fitting and ambitious final form for her conceptual projects via books, exhibitions and exciting collaborations. Her agility of thinking is reflected in the ways in which she combines disparate references in her work, and also in the interesting ways in which she adapts it to the site in which it is exhibited.
She has exhibited her work across the UK and internationally. Selected galleries include The British Museum, The Royal Scottish Academy, The Royal Academy in London, The Wellcome Collection London, Camden Art Centre, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts, The Finnish Museum of Photography, The FotoMuseum Antwerp, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Her work was part of the Biennale for Contemporary Photography in Germany in 2020, The International Biennale for Photography in Belo Horizonte (Brazil) in 2021, The Biennale for Electronic Language and Technology in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2022 and most recently the 2023 Tokyo Biennale.
She is Reader in Photography at the School of Fine Art and Photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury.
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Since 2019 Michael Raymond has been Assistant Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern where he works on exhibitions, collection displays and community programmes. He has co-curated the exhibitions Nam June Paik (2019), Cezanne (2022) and Philip Guston (2023), as well as displays including Vivan Sundaram, Rosa Barba and oversaw the Beuys’ Acorns installation by Ackroyd & Harvey on Tate Modern’s south terrace (2021).
Previously he worked at the British Museum on exhibitions including Hokusai (2017), Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece (2018), Manga (2019) and coordinated the Asahi Shimbun Displays.
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Rintala Eggertsson Architects (FI/NO)
Dagur Eggertsson and Sami Rintala are the founders of Rintala Eggertsson Architects, a Norway based architecture firm, which bases its activities around furniture design, public art, architecture, and urban planning. The work of Rintala Eggertsson Architects has been exhibited at the Maxxi Museum in Rome, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the National Art Museum of China and with the project ‘Corte Del Forte’ at the 2018 Venice Biennale. The company has received prestigious awards over the years such as The Global award for Sustainable Architecture, Wan 21 for 21 Award, Architizer A+Award, Travel & Leisure Award, American Architecture Award, and the International Architecture Award. Their projects and texts have been published in architecture magazines such as Abitare, Area, Architectural Review, A+U, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, D’A Magazine, AMC architecture, Detail, Domus, Topos, and Wallpaper as well as New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Eggertsson and Rintala have taught architecture in Europe, Australia, and North America and in 2019 as Gensler Visiting Professors at Cornell University in New York.
