Filip Dujardin: Fictions

Filip Dujardin photographs buildings in and around Ghent, the city of his birth, and reworks the resulting photographs. Since 2007 he has worked on a series in which those photographs are cut and reassembled through digital collage into architecture that could not be built: bridges, intricate residential complexes, interiors caught between gymnasium and factory, and abstract, apparently sculptural formations. Fictions, published by Hatje Cantz in 2014, is presented as the first monograph on this work.

What the pictures withhold is any announcement of their own impossibility. They arrive in the ordinary register of architectural photography, and only close inspection shows the construction to be implausible. Humor runs through the series, along with a persistent traffic with art history; these are fabrications in the literal sense, offered with persiflage and given a convincing photographic appearance. The viewer’s habits of trust do half the work, and are then withdrawn.

The collages draw on photographs of existing buildings in and around Ghent. This local material gives the invented architecture a connection with a real city, while the rearrangement produces structures that are implausible to build. The work brings the photographic appearance of existing architecture into a dialogue with imaginative construction.

The book is a substantial object: 120 pages, 102 photographs, hardcover, 276 by 294 millimetres, with texts by Pedro Gadanho in German and English, designed by Sven Beirnaert.

For a collector, the argument is the method. Dujardin’s pictures ask to be trusted first and examined second, and the pleasure sits in that second look. It is a body of work about the credibility of images, made by a photographer who understands precisely how architectural photographs earn that credibility. Published in 2014, the volume fixes a defined stage of a series whose premise — that photography can build what architecture cannot — is worked out, plate by plate, through humour and architectural invention.

The art and architectural photographer Filip Dujardin (*1971 in Ghent) has been working on a series since 2007 whose humor and entertainment value is accompanied by references to art history: Fictions presents wonderful objects in conceptional subjectivity and is full of jocularity and persiflage. With the aid of a digital collage technique consisting of photographs of existing buildings in and around Ghent, the city of his birth, the artist creates buildings that have been ingeniously imbedded in the landscape and whose construction would be impossible—fabrications in the true sense of the word. It is not until one inspects them more closely that one realizes that their construction and design is implausible. Readers will marvel at the impressive bridges, intricate residential complexes, strange interiors between gymnasium and industrial building, and abstract, apparently sculptural formations.

Designed by: Sven Beirnaert
Texts by: Pedro Gadanho
German, English
June 2014, 120 Pages , 102 Photos
hardcover
276mm x 294mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3802-6

Publisher page editorial text:
| The first monograph on the sophisticated architectural photography by the young artist
The art and architectural photographer Filip Dujardin (*1971 in Ghent) has been working on a series since 2007 whose humor and entertainment value is accompanied by references to art history: Fictions presents wonderful objects in conceptional subjectivit

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