Armin Linke
solo show

On endless travels throughout the world, Linke has used both film and photography to create a documentation of the effects of globalization, of the transformation of cities into megametropolises and their social and political consequences on human living conditions. His large format photo prints investigate these contemporary landscapes and our changed perception of space. The photograph “Ertan Dam, Panzhihua, China” (1998), which shows the construction site of a gigantic water dam, demonstrates the loss of scale of the individual faced with its own disappearance in extreme dimensions. With the Chinese workers fishing in the water appearing like miniature actors on a giant panoramic set, the colossal undertaking of the technical project is made almost physically felt. Contrary to the artificial entity of the grand vision of these pictures, the video “Baghdad” (2002) presents a fragmented view on the cityscape of Baghdad. Recorded in the elevator of a hotel, the view is partially looking on the Hotel Palestine which later formed the heart of the media apparatus during the war in Iraq. The series of going up and down the skyscraper creates a sequence of vertical images bound together by the continuous flux of the sound. Like the photographic prints, the film raises questions about the existence of any clearcut line between fiction and non-fiction.
It is the idea of the archive that always forms the conceptual framework for Linke’s photographic work. Playing on many different photographic fields such as fashion and performance, architecture, portrait and reportage, he continuously works on a potentially infinite archive of our contemporary imagery. Questions about how an archive can be represented and how it can be made accessible to the public has lead Linke to place his pictures on the net and to create his “Book on Demand” project, first introduced at Utopia Station at the Venice Biennial 2003. The viewer can flip through this interactive archive composing his or her individual Armin Linke book. The different methods of cataloguing, according to thematic, chronological or topographical order, reflect the complexity of the system based on the principle of multitude. The series of 7 books shown in the travelling exhibition in China are an extended version of this idea. While each book is put together according to the 7 typologies in Linke’s archive, the sequencing experienced while leafing through them renders the open system visible. Spread out next to each other on a long table, the books form a portable exhibition in which every constituent image can be possibly interchanged with the other.

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