Architecture is Frozen Music

What is the White City? #05
Architecture is Frozen Music
Laure Catugier
Curator: Sabrina Cegla
Opening: Thu, 12 May, 2022, 20:00

In the fifth exhibition at the Liebling Haus Project Room, Architecture is Frozen Music, French artist Laure Catugier examines the question What is the White City. The exhibition presents three iterations of an ongoing series of stop-motion videos created by the artist who sets her gaze on the geometric language of modernism. Using photography, video and performance, Catugier questions both the perception of space and its representation, deconstructing and reconstructing it with images and sounds she collects in cities she visits around the world as part of residency programs she attends.
Tel Aviv is the eighth city in this continuous project, and for the installation created here, she collaborated with the Israeli sound artist Hagai Izenberg. In addition to the video created during her current residency in Tel Aviv, the exhibition presents two videos she made in Alexandria and Tehran, which together offer a contemplation on modern architecture and urbanism in the Middle East. Each video is a travel journal of a new, yet familiar space, an acoustic and visual collage that together seek to resonate the fabric of historical regional connections that are evoked in her mental map.
The title of the exhibition suggests an alternative set of properties to architecture such as rhythm, echo, tonality, silence and sound, which are included in her examination of architectural forms and appearances. As part of her preoccupation with the global standardization of construction, Catugier examines the functionality of modernist architecture, urban spaces and their effect on the life they contain.
As an artist with a background in architecture, Catugier’s works are based on its codes which she misappropriates to question norms of measurements and experiment with geometries in space. Playing with scale, perspective, framing or echoing forms allows her to disrupt conventional Cartesian coordinates. She studies the relation between the human form and standardized building elements, materials, and their constraints, often using her own body as a tool. Finally, she introduces subjective spaces which defy the universality they wish to represent creating new architectural landscapes on the threshold of the scientific and playful, mathematical and poetic.
Sound: Hagai Izenberg (Tel Aviv), Rafael Canete Fernandez (Tehran), Ahmed Saleh (Alexandria)

At the opening event the work Catugier created in Tel Aviv will be projected on the Liebling Haus façade from sunset to 11 p.m. and will be accompanied by a sound performance by Hagai Izenberg.

The exhibition is supported by the French Institute in Israel.