Vistamare is pleased to present La terra vista dalla luna, a solo exhibition by Armin Linke.
Linke’s works provide us with a vision conducted from a different perspective than the one we are accustomed to, an upside-down perspective, as the title of the show (the earth seen from the moon)—the same title as the dreamlike short film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1967—implies.
Linke has been researching for some time now on how human activities, along with science, technology, economics, and politics, have produced the ongoing transformation of the planet. The pictures collected during his travels around the world form a sort of atlas of these metamorphosis: I’m interested in how the process of archiving challenges the images, forcing you to consider if the single photograph can survive the motivation that had driven you to shoot it in a specific instant, and whether, after being stored for a while, it could add other levels of interpretation, that you hadn’t thought about while taking it.
For his debut solo exhibition in the gallery space in Milan, the artist developed a path with works made over a long time-frame, from 1981 to 2023, selecting a mix of unedited images and works previously shown in other exhibitions, all drawn from his extensive archive.
The acquisition of new meanings relies also on the distinctive installation practice of the artist, who forges unexpected links by rearranging images created in contexts often distant in time and space, activating a series of dialogues, references and proximities. This way, photographs taken at different times and places find out the reason of standing next to each other, consistently instigating narratives on several levels and building a story through artificial and natural landscapes, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction.
Armin Linke was born in Milan in 1966. He is an artist who works with photography and film, devising processes that question the medium, its technologies, narrative structures and its complicity within broader socio-political structures. His work functions as a collection of tools to demystify different languages and conceptual strategies. In a collective approach with other interlocutors – creatives, researchers and scientists – the narratives of her works expand on the plane of multiple discourses, placing the themes of installation and exhibition at the centre. Linke’s works have been exhibited in various countries, his installation ‘Alps’ won the special prize at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale, and ‘Image Capital’ won the Kubus Sparda Art Prize in 2019.
Former artist in residence at KHI in Florence, and guest artist at CERN in Geneva, he is currently guest professor at ISIA in Urbino and professor at Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Armin Linke. Carlo Mollino. Paesaggi Inclinati” at Forte di Bard, Aosta in 2023, “Capital Image New Technologies and Economies of Photography, Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke” at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2023,’Image Capital’ (with Estelle Blaschke) at MAST in Bologna and at Museum Folkwang in Essen in 2022; ‘Earth Indices. Processing the Anthropocene” (with Giulia Bruno) at the HKW in Berlin in 2022, “Blind Sensorium” at the Matadero in Madrid in 2021 and at the Domenico Ridola National Archaeological Museum in 2019, on the occasion of Matera European Capital of Culture.