Armin Linke was born in 1966 and lives in Berlin. As a photographer and filmmaker he analyses the formation, the “Gestaltung” of our natural, technological and urban environment, perceived as a diverse space of continuous interaction. His photographs and films function as tools to become aware of different design strategies.Through working with his own archive, as well as with other media archives, Linke challenges the conventions of photographic practice, whereby the questions of how photography is installed and displayed become increasingly important. In a collective approach with artists, designers, architects, historians and curators, narratives are procured on the level of multiple discourses.
He was Research Affiliate at MIT Visual Arts Program Cambridge, guest professor at the IUAV Arts and Design University in Venice and professor for photography at the University for Arts and Design Karlsruhe.
The following excerpt is from Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act, published in Berlin by The Green Box in 2017. A collaboration between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke—supported by the Graham Foundation—the book introduces the concept of an “architecture of Balkanization” and explores textually and visually what that might be in the landscape of the decentralized socialist society of Yugoslavia.
Armin Linke (Italian, born 1966) is a traveler in search of strange, yet familiar frontiers; his photographs spring from a peripatetic practice that has taken him from the slopes of the massive infrastructural transformations rent by the Three Gorges Dam in China, to the technologically crafted snow-globe winters of Ski Dubai’s interiors. Each photograph forms…
