Visual artist Asta Cink has her roots in dance and acting. “Gegenüber Mir” is a picture story that uses photography as a way of self-questioning and self-assurance. The photographs, single images, as if extracted from performative sequences, photographed with grainy B/W film, appear as traces of a human existence, as if in a laboratory independent of any social context. The Barthesian “it-is-as-it-was,” which belongs causally to every analog photograph as a reference to finitude, is also a pervasive motif in Cink’s pictures. The mirror is the supporting prop in her photo performances. In her photographs, it reflects the counterpart in a fractured form − often out of focus, or it even largely refuses a faithful depiction. Cink uses the mirror in its meaning as a vanitas motif, constantly referring to the fleeting and transient nature of our existence. “It makes us think about the presence and absence of our vanity. Is it perhaps a virtue? In the pursuit of self-assurance, the self multiplies until it surrounds itself, until it exists behind, between, under, against, and in front of itself.” “Looking into the mirror is for me like looking into the camera. Photography allows me to capture this fleetingness in analog film footage.”

Asta Cink, *1981 in Vienna. Lives and works in Vienna.