SPARK ART FAIR 2024 – Marko Zink

At the center of the exhibition booth the series “Inner Film,” (“inner movie”), which serves as a stage for his narrative photographs, guiding visitors through the entire presentation like a compass. In this work, Marko Zink autobiographically delves into his family history by depicting 24 handheld mirrors with staged portraits of his family. The series explores the dynamics of memories by playing with presence and absence, illustrating that they do not behave statically. Sometimes they appear stronger, sometimes weaker, before fading completely.

For this series, the mirror, as a recurring motif, undergoes special printing to create a three-dimensional impression when observed, causing the portraits to shift based on lighting and perspective. This method pays homage to the inception of photography, particularly referencing the 19th-century Daguerreotype process.

The underwater series “alles was sie sagen” (“everything they say”), located on the right side of the exhibition booth, focuses on portraits of renowned authors, including Sarah Kirsch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan, Oscar Wilde, and Sylvia Plath. These portraits, applied to antique medallions, are staged in the sea, the origin of all life. They are presented at the exhibition booth in various ways, including in a tabula scalata that changes its perspective abruptly. The amalgamation of image fragments into a three-dimensional installation creates a multi-layered reality that blurs the boundaries between presence and absence, reality, and imagination. The series explores the origins of language and emphasizes the fundamental role of literature and art.

In the third cycle of works, exhibited on the left side, Zink showcases series focusing on the theme of the forest. The renowned literary scholar Robert P. Harrison astutely observed that the forest mirrors the condition of culture. Over the centuries, culture has continually developed in opposition to the forest, yet paradoxically, it has always remained dependent on it. This concept is vividly visualized in Zink’s photographs, where he intricately intertwines the familiar and the eerie.

Through the combination of seemingly incompatible elements, such as wallpapers on tree trunks or the fusion of humans and nature, Zink creates a surreal world where the boundaries between reality and fiction blur. Once again, the artist incorporates the element of the mirror, as a solitary hybrid (half-human, half-peacock) searches for beauty amidst the scenery of a burnt forest, only to be dazzled by its own reflection. The beauty of nature, destroyed by human exploitation, is captured in a single image.

At the heart of the exhibition booth, another hybrid (half hare, half human) captivates the observer: the photograph titled “This is Desire” presents a muscular individual wearing a luminous rabbit mask at night. It is not only a visual, sensual piece of art but also a catalyst for philosophical reflections on the nature of desire and the ambivalence between civilization and nature.