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Armin Linke Mahakumbhmela
Armin Linke’s second solo show presented his most recent photographic work, Mahakumbhmela.
The project is the result of a two-year research period during which the artist made several journeys worldwide, with the aim of producing a series of “panoramic” photographic works investigating man’s impact on the surrounding environment. In his previous piece, Global Box (1998-2000), Linke’s camera was already pointed at the challenges man imposes upon nature, in his depictions of monumental engineering and architectural works. Intent on demonstrating that anything is possible anywhere, these man-made interventions instead revealed the human weakness, worldwide technological emancipation notwithstanding. In his latest work, Linke continues this research, this time shifting his focus to the “accumulation” that removes the individuality from a place and replaces it with a universal quality. In so doing, he draws our attention to the fact that the parameters we use to quantify territory will become decreasingly specific and increasingly global.
Held once every twelve years, Mahakumbhmela is a Hindu festival, considered to be the largesreligious festival in the world. On one single day, around 20 million people congregate in order to bathe together at the point, held to be sacred, where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers meet in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. This regular city of six hundred thousand inhabitants, transforms itself entirely to accommodate the vast number of visitors over this incredibly short period of time. In the photographs and video of which the show is composed, Linke’s eye ranges over this monumental, mystical concentration of pilgrims, whose impact on the area is extremely clear yet highly complex. Linke’s art plays with tradition and, in particular, with aesthetics, creating a subtle tension between abstraction and figuration, and language of purely optical effects. Linke’s work confronts viewers with a vision of the future via images of a world that is largely unknown to western culture and raises issues that hover between past and present.
Born in 1966, Armin Linke lives and works in Milan. His works were recently shown as part of the Valencia Biennale and were recently displayed at the seventh Architecture Biennale in Venice and at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His work has also been included in the traveling exhibition Cities on the Move, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanrou, at the PS1 Gallery in New York, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, and the CAPC Museé d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux. Recently he has held solo shows in various galleries including: Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Galleria Mole, Tokyo; and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
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Mahakumbhmela - invitation
2001
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