Julie Boserup

We built a house is an exhibition about architecture, dreams and destruction. It presents new works by two outstanding contemporary artists who for a whole year have worked with selected photographs in the collection at The Royal Library.

Can one build a photograph? In a new photo exhibition the visual artists Søren Lose and Julie Boserup make a number of attempts. Using extensive collages and installations they build up three-dimensional versions of historical photos of architecture. For two years, Julie Boserup and Søren Lose have researched in The Royal Library’s archive of over 17 million historical photographs. From their hiding-place they have extracted photographs of grandiose church architecture and functionalist landmarks, and in the hands of the two visual artists the hidden treasures of the archive gain a new lease of life.

The exhibition We built a house shows twenty new works in which the two artists investigate the various meanings of architecture, and how architecture is represented in the photograph. Architecture is an expression of power and dreams, which the architecture photographer seeks to make visible as a vision of the building or documentation for posterity. Public buildings are monuments to the ideals society has of the good life, as these ideals were at the time the building was built. Gothic cathedrals soared heavenwards and expressed the then view of the world, while the sober 20th century colleges of educational buildings express the will to provide education for all. The artists have processed the images by enlarging, cutting, folding, extending, drawing and sewing new versions of the historical photographs, and in this way they have underlined both the changing meanings of architecture and the effects that can be produced by the architectural photograph.