Filip Dujardin
short CV
Filip Dujardin was born in Ghent (Be.) in 1971. He studied art history at Ghent University and photography at the Royal Academy of Ghent. Since 2007 Filip Dujardin works as an independent architectural photographer and visual artist. In 2008, Dujardin presents his series "Fictions" for the first time in BOZAR/Brussels, a collection of digital photocollages of imaginary architecture. In 2011 his work was purchased by the MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and San Francisco. A first monograph was published in 2014 called "Fictions 2007-2014". Dujardin was part of the "Bravoure team" in 2016 for the exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice and in 2018 he participated in the Architecture Biennale in Chicago. Solo exhibitions will follow in the Van der Mieden Gallery in Antwerp, in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Katowice (Poland), Nantes (Fr.), Madison an San Francisco (U.S.A.), Amersfoort (NL) and Brussels.
Abstract
Playing in the Ruins
In this lecture I will explain how my artistic work evolved out of my activities as an architectural photographer. By dessecting buildings through the lense of a camera I became aware of how the vocabulary and grammatics of architecture works. This knowledge gave me the material to play with these rules and create new images dealing with typology, scale and form, historical awareness, cultural and political status of architecture. This body of work consists of a series of digital photocollages which represents fictious architecture. They are constructed images built out of pictures of existing architecture. They are the result of a "romantic" longing for a kind of architecture that doesn't exist in reality. Their plausibility on paper give them an aura of an impossible reality. However I'm not an architect the need to operate in real space is always present. Therefore I also will show my spatial installations where I explore the themes in my photographic work translated in spatial actions. They are part of a cyclus of photographing reality (architectural photography) that slips into a work that is deconstructing, re-arranging and compressing reality (photocollage) and finally becoming reality again (3d installations).