Armin Linke

The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Milan-Cinisello Balsamo and the Marubi National Museum of Photography present A Card or Maybe Two - Modalities of Photography, an exhibition by Armin Linke, one of the most interesting and internationally acclaimed artists, in the Marubi exhibition spaces in Shkodër.

The exhibition project is composed of two complementary elements, visual and textual, the outcome of a process of research, investigation and systematization of Armin Linke's photographic archive – over 500,000 images – based on the relationship between photography and language. This process is one of the possible interpretations of the archive, during which a series of new graphic and photographic works were produced as a result of the scanning and study of archived negatives. The installation intends to play with such a critical mass of images and to retrieve the physical, gestural and emotional dimension of the act of selection, a practice that also evokes musical composition or choreography, reintroducing a theatrical and performative dimension to the work. In a mutually interdependent relationship, the information obtained from the images, texts, data and metadata has a dialectical influence on the generation of the images themselves. In this way, the role of the author, who assumes an increasingly diversified dimension, as well as that of the viewer, who becomes an active protagonist in the fruition of the works, are challenged.

Maria Nadotti's text, Navigation Layers. Notes on Armin Linke's photographic work, guides and accompanies the exhibition, interweaving biographical references to the artist, detailed information about his work and more general considerations about the archive and about photography. This text, with its autonomous content and linguistic richness, becomes an integral part of the project and, like a cartographic instrument, provides a system of orientation but does not constrict the viewer to specific trajectories.

The exhibition is one of the chapters of the larger project Images and Text – Visual Notations, promoted by the Museum of Contemporary Photography with Armin Linke and with the support of the Italian Council (5th Edition, 2019), a programme of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism for the promotion of Italian contemporary art in the world.

The project was developed in different locations and the artist's archive triggered specific physical and symbolic interactions with each exhibition space and with their collections. Last September, an itinerant seminar hosted at the Kunsthistorisches Institut and at the Max-Planck-Institut featured the artist's works in non-artistic archives, and the documentation was published in a study notebook; the Marubi National Museum of Photography in Shkodër hosts this exhibition; the Museum of Contemporary Photography will add the newly produced series of works to its collections and, finally, the Centre de la Photographie Genève will host the presentation of the book that includes a selection of images and critical contributions.