Vistamare presents the gallery’s second exhibition dedicated to the work of Armin Linke. The 29 new photographic images that have been produced specifically for the show represent a small part of the huge archive that the artist is creating – a collection of approximately 3,000 contact sheets put together during his travels all over the world. These images are catalogued not according to a specific logic or a precise criterion but mainly on the basis of the artist’s personal obsessions and fixations. One section captures the transformations – both anthropological and urban – of places; one area is populated with photographs that evoke a sort of science-fiction imagery; then there are the places of which no image exists or those in which the images are entirely saturated with media. Finally there are photographs that are unidentifiable or which, behind an easily-defined identity, conceal another unexpected one and which, at times, acquire a second identity thanks to the way in which they are combined.
Armin Linke’s work oscillates between two constantly-present characters: on one hand an epic dimension, in that we often encounter landscapes containing an element that crushes the human scale, and on the other hand a minutely-detailed archiving based on the principle of the multitude. Both such moments permit a physical perception of the spaces represented.
Linke always seems to photograph using the perspective of the figures caught in the shot, observing from the point of view of the framed subject. “For this reason I sometimes place the camera on the ground, or on the objects within the spaces [being photographed]. At times I use the wide-angle lens to show the sum of details whose relationship would otherwise be imperceptible. And in using it I bring myself physically closer to them, to the point of rendering myself vulnerable, but this approach is necessary in order to reveal things and to avoid “stealing” the images, to avoid using or doing violence to a piece of reality that one has chosen to observe.” It is out of this sensibility that Linke’s images are born, and he describes them as follows: “The Vatican: a city of whose daily life no photographs exist. The investiture of the bishops, inside the Vatican, the viewpoints adopted are decisive and unique.
G8: a wall, 350 gates for every alleyway… built in the night, in secret. Embarrassment.
North Pole, via Siberia with Antonov helicopters: an hour’s flight consumes 800 litres of diesel. North Pole, an abstract place, arrivals, celebrations (…) the ice that opens up and closes over is like an abstract act, organic and cold, a non-existent city.
Iran: we enter the mosque of Khomeini, my girlfriend wears a chador out of respect (…) the place is pleasant, children playing, men reading or sleeping on the carpets, all very relaxing.”
Then it is the poetry of the images that speaks to us: that of the sacred sites build by the nomads in the territories of the western Sahara, that of the Hattian district in Pakistan, or the little restaurant looking over Cairo, the women dancing for Saddam Hussein’s birthday, and a house, in Germany, that seems to hover over the water.