EVENTS

New temporary photographic exhibition by Erieta ATTALI

A new periodic photography exhibition by the internationally acclaimed and award-winning Greek-Israeli architectural and landscape photographer Erieta Attali, entitled: WOODSCAPES / ERIETA ATTALI ON KENGO KUMA, will be presented on June 16, 2023, at the Byzantine & Christian Museum.

After the quite successful photographic exhibition entitled: Limina, in the summer of 2021, Attali returns to the B.C.M. with another exhibition, focusing on the wooden architectural works of Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, located from the most remote parts of Japan to the city center of Paris.

Erieta Attali develops her photographic projects with a multitude of images and years of - often - dedication to the same subject. However, this second exhibition at the same museum, through a selection of fifteen photographs, is a distillation of her essential personal dialogue with architecture.

These are layered images, with spatial and cognitive implications, that succinctly and summarily capture the whole essence of her own approach to architectural photography as a series of ever-changing perspectives and experiences.

Unlike commercial photography, which captures designed objects for consumption in the context of constant competition and, as such, is produced-distributed under the shadow of an imaginary expiration date, Attali's art is born out of the totality of a single designer's work, always attempting to reach the atmosphere, the essence and the central idea of conception that is transformed from project to project.

Over a period of, more than a quarter of a century, among the few relationships formed by Attali's photographer, none has been more reciprocal than that with Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, as the fusion of designed space and environment is a common goal of architect and photographer.

Combining the engineering and construction feat of uninterrupted, vast glass surfaces with innovative interpretations of traditional Japanese wooden architecture, Kengo composes spaces that both visually and experientially reference the changing values of the natural environment. His works pulse in an almost supernatural resonance with Attali's photographic practice. Through the glass lenses of her analog cameras, she seeks out and captures the permeability of the natural and man-made environment, merging hard and reflective surfaces into layered images filled with the atmosphere of the sheer essence of Kuma's architectural art.

Not surprisingly, Attali identifies her first encounter with Kuma's architecture, at the turn of the millennium, as the pivotal moment for the two artists. Ironically, her first encounter with the Japanese architect's work was through the lens of another photographer: a published photograph of his - now much-published - early work, Water/Glass House, in Atami, Japan. In this building, opacity and oscillating transparency are the real building blocks of the architecture. The process of capturing these intangible elements transformed Attali's photographic art and aesthetic criteria.

Inspired by the feeling that in Kuma's work she had found the contemporary architectural equivalent of the relationship between environment and building, landscape and architecture (a relationship she had been exploring for years by photographing archaeological sites), Attali experienced Kuma's work as a turning point, focusing her lens on the introduction of the new into ancient and timeless environments. As she recounts in a revealing interview with historian/critic Ariel Genandt, the encounter was transformative: "What fascinated me about Water/Glass House was that the building is experienced as an atmospheric condition: when you're inside it, you feel part of the landscape... My encounter with the house ... helped me to crystallize a certain photographic concept, where architecture and landscape form an unbroken continuum."

Duration of the exhibition: 16 June 2023 to 31 October 2023

Photo: Takanawa Gateway railway station, Tokyo, Japan (© Attali)