Armin Linke combines photography and video to create projects that investigate the environment we inhabit through its relationships with technology, nature, history, economics, and politics. His work combines artistic practice and scientific inquiry in a process that often involves, alongside the artist, specially formed networks of scholars and specialists.
In this dialogue with Francesco Zanot, Linke will retrace his career, highlighting the continuity of these characterizing elements up to the genesis and fundamental steps that led to the creation of IMAGE CAPITAL, in which photography is at once artistic language, investigation tool and main subject.
Armin Linke (b. 1966, Milan) is an artist working with photography by setting up processes that question the medium, its technologies, narrative structures, and complicities within wider socio-political structures. Linke’s work observes how human beings (re-)design and use space and time as social forms: it constructs questions / propositions on planning the future, on the hidden entanglements and inter-dependences within the human and other-than collective design practices, and the shifting of sites of responsibility. Linke’s exhibiting practice sets up performative scripts in which different voices and methods come together.
Former MIT Visual Arts Program research affiliate, guest professor at the IUAV Arts and Design University in Venice, and professor of photography at the Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design, Linke is currently a guest professor at ISIA, Urbino, artist in residence at the KHI Florenz, and guest artist at the CERN Geneva.
Francesco Zanot is a photography curator, teacher and writer. Founding curator at Camera (the Italian Centre for Photography, Turin) from 2015-18, he has worked on exhibitions and publications with and about many Italian and international photographers, such as Boris Mikhailov, Carlo Mollino, Francesco Jodice, Takashi Homma, Erik Kessels, and Luigi Ghirri. His essays have been published in monographs on the work of numerous artists worldwide, and together with Alec Soth, he is the author of the book Ping Pong Conversations. Director of the Master in Photography and Visual Design organised by NABA in Milan, he gave classes and seminars in many academic institutions, such as the Columbia University in New York, ECAL in Lausanne, UPV in Valencia and IUAV in Venice. He curated the inaugural exhibitions Give Me Yesterday and Stefano Graziani: Questioning Pictures, at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan. He’s currently artistic director of the Foto/Industria Biennale at Fondazione MAST, Bologna.