Ilit Azoulay

At the appearance of things, 2011

The photo At the appearance of things brings together the famous photograph Die Weberinnen auf der Bauhaustreppe [The Weavers on the Bauhaus Steps] of 1928, by T. Lux Feininger (original photograph 10.8 x 8.3 cm, Collection Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin) with a narrow passageway and an imposing, brilliantly green natural fragment. Oskar Schlemmer painted his famous picture Bauhaustreppe (Museum of Modern Art, New York), based on this photograph, in 1932, explicitly as a response to the closing of the Bauhaus by order of the National Socialist government. The photographic artworks by Ilit Azoulay are based on a collection of existing photographs from a number of different contexts – historical, art historical and media – as well as photos of architectural elements taken by the artist herself, which Azoulay has assembled in her studio. She scanned the photographs and used a computer to montage them as new image spaces that are open to interpretation, in such a way that the boundaries between the different motifs are transcended in virtuoso style – although the intention is always to make the viewer still more acutely aware of the mutually alien character of the various spheres, spaces and events.