analog underwater photography

An instant of supernatural beauty is being evoked. This also is just one example: a delicate white fabric drifting through the water to assume the form of a grand splendid shell. This is the ephemeral nature of shapes, showing the transitoriness of existence. Marko Zink shows us that shapes are being created – even if the human sense of perception is either too slow or too fast. We grasp, and sense that the shapes of matter are not static, but flowing, floating, sometimes very slowly over long periods of time, like the evolution of species. Rigid shapes and flowing transience, insisting upon the “I” and the inevitable passing of time, sweeping away and changing everything, all these layers are metaphorically placed one upon the other, just like two translucent pictures forming one single theme: “No enlightenment without illusion, no illusion without enlightenment.”

Diethard Leopold: Between Play and Pervasion.A note on Marko Zink’s photo series “Swimmers”; (excerpt). Priviously unreleased; Vienna (A) 2012.

analog underwater photography

analog underwater photography

analog photography

One project that worked extremely well in its entirety is the series about the spa hotel and complex of Schruns in the Vorarlberg region of Austria. Built in the early 1950s this institution had grown by the 1970s into one of the most famous and finest therapeutic spas of its kind. But its turnover began to fall, and since 2002 the complex of building has been empty and deserted, the atmosphere is almost spooky. Even the owner just vanished, overnight, leaving his Porsche parked outside. Many rumours abound as to where he could be and speculation has been rife about what will happen to the complex. Now the plan is to demolish it. This place, with its unspoken stories, was predistined for photographer Marko Zink: Out of it he created a series of provocative images, putting his finger on the paradox of a crumbling therapeutic institution – the »doctor« had become the patient. In these searching images he captures a transience that is independent of the motif, thanks to his special photographic technique. An arm hangs over the side of a bed, over there someone stands behind a curtain. There is a fleeting glimpse of a glamorous past that quickly dissipates into the sadness of negelct and piles of abandoned furniture. A private tragedy in Zink’s own life (…) may also have contributed to the intense melancholy in this series. Vitality and death lay very close together in the artistic concept – reality underpinned it with pitiless force.

Bettina Schulz: Panta Rhei (excerpt): In: NOVUM (world of graphic design 05/12), Munich (D), 2012

analog photography

analog photography

The title points deliberately to two people. However, on the pictures and the video there is clearly only one person to be seen – a naked man climbing over his tractor, imitating the ignition and engine and shaking backwards and forwards. The mask that resembles the famous name giver is just as disconcerting as the naked body. The blown up belly underlines the grotesque imagination that this man could indeed have such a strange hobby in a barn. What, at the beginning, appears to be funny and amusing causes irritation and shame. The viewer is being personally touched and involved. Is it really appropriate to laugh?

Exhibition text: (c) widmer+theodoridis contemporary, Zurich 2012 (CH)

analog panorama photography

Are those animals? No, they’re we-ings, but with interspersions of animals. Animals without power fantasies, which only humans have. Animals simply eat, including their opponents, if necessary. Animals fail to gauge their size when they push through undergrowth, be it without duress or under duress, for instance because someone is running after and chasing them in order to own them and then subject them to decisions when they can’t go on running. Therefore, they often decide to try to escape, what else should they decide to do?, yes, to also attack because they are hungry or covet their neighbor’s wife, a nice hind for example.

Elfriede Jelinek: In the Forest. (excerpt). In: Blinde Flecken. Werkkatalog Marko Zink. Vienna 2010.

analog photography

analog photography

It is indeed a slightly dizzy feeling that befalls the viewer when he or she notices the shifting imagery in Marko Zink’s forests. A feeling of unease arises when we realize that on the visual plane, the artist tells a wholly different story than the one suggested by the intense green of young pine needles, the silence between the tree trunks, and the sublimity of the forest.

Anne Katrin Fessler: Fateful Forest. (excerpt). In: Blinde Flecken. Werkkatalog Marko Zink. Vienna 2010.

analog photography

Through his method of taking photographs – his film material has been chemically and mechanically altered in advance – and the selected scenes, Marko Zink emphasizes a strictly vertical arrangement of the tree trunks and their brittle structures. He has reduced the forest theme to the dullness and aggressiveness of the tree stumps that seem almost merged into an impenetrable, hard wall and are arranged in a military-style order – a far cry from idyllic solitude.

Andrea Domesle: That’s how it is. (excerpt). In: Es ist so. Galerie Michaela Stock (http://www NULL.galerie-stock NULL.net/), Vienna 2008.

analog underwater photography

analog photography

So, you can also share with a machine, share your workload with a machine, the work that is you. That makes things easier because the machine is told what to do. The machine operator tells it what to do. The idea is not to crawl inside because one knows beforehand that one will never fit inside entirely. The machine is a mystery to us, it means nothing to itself because, as stated above, it is always told what to do. One tells the other, he passes it on. The machine doesn’t pass anything on, it is an executive organ from which human organs sometimes protrude in some places; because this human won’t fit completely into the device and his organs not into his body, he has partially remained outside. In part, he had to stay outside. In order to at least retain his humanity outside the door? That’s a lost cause.

Elfriede Jelinek: In the machine. (excerpt). Previously unreleased. Vienna 2010

analog photography

analog photography

The famous metaphor of the photograph as a footprint ­ which is caused by touch and contact just as the exposure of the photographic image results from light falling onto a negative ­ is depicted in the “Kornhäusl” series in the true sense of the word. A photograph is an imprint of something that has long ceased to exist. It is a vestige of a referent that has vanished.
In these images, however, it is not only the villa that has disappeared by now but also its one-time occupant and his personal history, which is nevertheless portrayed and preserved in a photographic image. In this dialectic between things past and their continuing presence lies the significance of the photograph as memory. Photography creates objects that touch off a process of recollection in the viewer¹s mind.

Walter Moser: In Search of Traces. Marko Zink’s “Kornhäusl” series. (excerpt).
In: Blinde Flecken. Werkkatalog Marko Zink. Vienna 2010.

Analoge Fotografie

analog photography

Marko Zink counters the camera-work of “staged photography” with a subjectively motivated, almost private materiality which, unlike staged freeze-frames, cannot be translated into the mechanisms of photorealism. Quite to the contrary, it wrings a poetic concreteness from the subject of the Nature Morte of Western art history as it seems only for a limited period of time to capture that which triggered the shutter release, meaning it also contains its undoing, its disembodiment.

Ingo Springenschmid: About Marko Zink. (excerpt); previously unreleased.

analog photography

Sometimes, gasoline, chlorine, or emery paper is responsible for the uniquely haptic quality of the images, for example, the series „thisisnotgsus“. Here, Zink worked with „an eye for dissolution“, as he puts it. A face is fixed, and the changes that often take place in fragments of segments are captured: the first signs of a complete dissolution from which there is no escape.

Ursula Philadelphy: On the Boarder of Painting. (excerpt). In: EIKON: International magazine for photography and media art # 65. Vienna 2009.

analog b/w photography