Schilt Publishing recently launched the monograph and traveling exhibition This Room Will Survive Me at the 40th anniversary FotoFest Biennial in Houston, Texas, both presenting a richly curated selection from a body of over 700 original instant prints.
To create this work, Konits turned to an obsolete professional instant camera and remaining batches of expired, discontinued Fuji instant film. Surprisingly, this instant medium for instant photography accommodated slow, meditative exposures to capture the soft drift of sunlight and deep weight of shadows within the architecture of buildings and surrounding landscape.
The images themselves function at the intersection of spatial perception and material process, emphasizing the porous qualities of built environments and expressive instability of film itself.
Architecture appears less as a stable container than the responsive field that it is absorbing, refracting, and echoing presence as the film s expired chemistry and long exposures introduce softness, distortion, and ambiguity that mirror the mutability of experience, constantly reassembled by the rooms we inhabit.
“Konits takes us on a philosophical and spiritual journey, considering our mortality and reflecting on the traces we leave behind in the memories of others in connection with these rooms, houses, and physical spaces. The visual portrayal of the translucent female figure also makes us contemplate the fleeting nature of our memories of those who were once important to us but are no longer with us.” – Zsolt Bátori, philosopher of art and photography theoris
Architecture is more than an engagement with visual aesthetics. It is a stage for choreographed interaction with our personal histories and each other. In her book, This Room Will Survive Me, lens-based artist Cindy Konits invites us to think of architecture as the mediation between the world and the mind, as the liminal space mediating human perception of experience, memory, meaning and the material world of structures, climate, objects.
“Cindy Konits’s photographic Polaroids fuse spaces of rooms and nature with a female figure, creating uniquely poetic images. The images depict the photographer’s home and her body, projecting a nearness, intimacy and credibility.” – Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, architectural philosopher and critic
Initially edited by Elizabeth Avedon and designed by Teun van der Heijden, the monograph, This Room Will Survive Me, is further enriched by an essay from renowned architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa and an extensive interview conducted by former MIT curator of Photography and Architecture Gary Van Zante. Together, these creative minds brilliantly reinforce the quality of Konits work as a powerful exploration of architecture as nexus between space and time that is otherwise limitless and endless.
By capturing her own presence on the final remnants of a vanishing medium, Konits is a stand-in for the human reconciliation of permanence and ephemerality. In a visual representation of interiority, This Room Will Survive Me reminds us that we don’t merely pass through rooms and natural outdoor boundaries; we experience our lives within them, trusting the architecture to hold our ghosts long after the shutter has closed.
Cindy Konits is a lens-based artist exploring memory with evolving technologies. She won first place Budapest International Photo Award, Fine Art, top 200 Critical Mass 2024, London Photography Awards Fine Arts gold medal 2024, first place Visual Art Open Photography 2023, London, first and second prize Photo Review 2022, 2023. She has won numerous Julia Cameron, Pollux awards. Her work appears in The In-Between Journal of New Media Photography, PhotoNostrum, and Shots magazines.
Cindy Konits : This Room Will Survive Me – Architecture and Interiority
Schilt Publishing & Gallery
Essay by Juhani Pallasmaa
Interview with Cindy Konits by Gary Van Zante
Edited by Elizabeth Avedon
Design by Teun van der Heijden
Double carton softcover with flaps
202 Pages including partly Japanese binding
60 photos in full color, 21 x 27 cm portrait
ISBN 978-90-5330-966-7
€45 | £40 | $55
https://www.schiltpublishing.com/shop/books/new-releases/this-room-will-survive-me-architecture-and-interiority/
