Charlie Koolhaas: True Cities / Architekturforum Aedes, Berlin

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Charlie Koolhaas: True Cities / Architekturforum Aedes, Berlin

February 11, 2009

True Cities at Architekturforum Aedes is a photo(geo)graphical installation by Dutch artist Charlie Koolhaas. True Cities is a collection of photographs that show four metropolises which each in a specific way form the current political and cultural landscape. The installation is a patchwork, bringing together the urban structures of Guangzhou, Dubai, Lagos and London. The exhibition comprises hundreds of different pictures that show the interconnectedness of the world.
Charlie Koolhaas is a Dutch artist raised in London who currently works from her studio in Guangzhou, China. Trained as a sociologist, throughout her career she has worked as a magazine editor, exhibition curator, writer as well as photographer, and in her photos we see this multidisciplinary approach applied to the urban experience. In True Cities she brings together hundreds of disparate images of different places to bounce off each other, resonate and begin a dialogue.
In this video Charlie Koolhaas talks about the concept of the exhibition. The show runs until the 26th March 2009.
Architekturforum Aedes, Berlin / Germany. January 30, 2009. Video by Martin Griessmüller.

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The exhibition will include a series of 200 images viewed like a large ‘book’ that spans the entire wall of the AedesLAND space. Within these pages images of Lagos, Nigeria are paired with images of Dubai, UAE. In the arches of the gallery hanging photographs place Guangzhou, China and London, UK side by side so that they feel like two distant suburbs in the same city. ‘True Cities’ is an exhibition of the world. It is about cultural fusion and confusion, connections, moments of creativity and pain. By looking at the opulent and insignificant, the broken down and the emerging, these photographs depict the mundane and the absurd with equal enthusiasm.