BASEL.- The Architekturmusem presents "Miriam Bäckström, Claudio Moser, Heidi Specker and Edwin Zwakman photographed the Architekturmuseum," on view through 11 August 2002. These artists, two male and two female, have all previously addressed space in their photographs. For the "Viewing Space" exhibition, they were invited to address the Architekturmuseum as a building. The intention was use a particular object to sharpen their focus, taking a close look at different approaches to architecture. By choosing artists from the younger generation we have opened up a broad spectrum of contemporary photography that places sociological and media-specific issues in the foreground, alongside abstract, structural questions.

The four artists’ positions demonstrate various ways of examining architecture, operating on the planes of the façade, interior and exterior space, whether space can be represented and in association with this, examining photography itself. And in the course of their research about space, their "viewing" of space, their images of space also expand into real space.

Heidi Specker (Berlin) gives isolated fragments from the façade of the Architekturmuseum a painterly and abstract dimension, allowing the physical quality of the museum to float in the white surroundings. She uses serial hanging to repeat the grid systems that form the basis of her work, while a structure made up of metal plates reflects Rasser + Vadi’s façade and intervenes in the space.

In contrast with this, Miriam Bäckström (Stockholm) is concerned with museum presentation, and with documenting it. In her images, reality usually seems staged, unreal or even uncanny, as the spaces she photographs have no people in them, and constantly suggest that something is absent.

Edwin Zwakman (Amsterdam) takes precisely the opposite approach. He photographs constructed reality in the form of models, which seem to come closer to reality than reality itself. But the strange viewpoint reveals reality to be beautiful appearance, an illusion, which as in the cinema is created by a film set.

Claudio Moser (Basel) approaches spaces physically, by feeling his way through them with a still or a video camera. In his work for the Architekturmuseum, Moser uses reflections to blur, veil and change the spatial structures inside and outside the building, thus creating a new atmospheric space.