Vistamare presents a one-man show by Armin Linke. Four large-scale photographs taken around the world will be on display in the central hall of the gallery: the technicians of the Paranal astronomical observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile; the excavations for construction of a lock for boat traffic at the Three Gorges Dam in China; the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan; the areas surrounding the wall built in the Spanish Sahara.
The interest aroused by Armin Linke’s images is not simply the immediate sensation of disorientation, of the loss of measure and a sense of profound fragility in the face of phenomena that lie beyond our individual control, but above all a glance that probes a deep intuition of reality. At times this intuition becomes a political view of the world, dispelling the idea of simple documentation and fearlessly illustrating a form of critical enamourment with reality.
Curiosity towards the extraordinary variety of the world does not lead to losing oneself: every image creates a sense of subtle distance towards a vision that is not only offered but also demands respectful comprehension.
In all the images on display, great geopolitical and anthropological changes perform an essential and primary function, because they represent a way to select places by concentrating on the great transformations that engulf them. Only at this point does one’s gaze manage to select and focus all of the minor dynamics that surround great changes.
The quest to document situations where the boundaries between fiction and reality become so thin as to disappear is also expressed in the video “Bagdad” (2002) shot in Baghdad one year before the war, inside the Sheraton Hotel. The video was shot inside the hotel elevator and affords a partial view of the Palestine Hotel, which would be used as the headquarters by world media during the war in Iraq. The continual ascent and descent up and down the skyscraper creates a series of vertical images that are marked by the continuous flow of sound; here again, our gaze offers the possibility of reeducating our view of external reality by seeking not to stop at an accommodating, modernist vision of a world that grows in only one direction.