Based on photography and its extension in the medium of film, Alina Schmuch (*1987 in Münster) uses artist's books and video installations to investigate the interaction between the visual medium and reality. In doing so, she raises the question of what influence the camera has on reality and what realities become visible through it. Photography and film serve her as an investigative medium that enables aesthetic examinations of visual and verbal structures. In her artist's book Script of Demolition (Spector Books, Leipzig 2014), for example, she presents and arranges the photographic archive of the Fink family of blasters, who have meticulously documented each of the blasts they have carried out over the last 60 years. The blasters use the camera like a measuring apparatus to be able to study the process and the result in detail. In her current project, she works with images of the reticulated water infrastructures in the Ruhr region.
Alina Schmuch studied media art at the HfG Karlsruhe and was part of the postgraduate program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Her work has been shown in exhibitions, screenings or lectures at Künstlerhaus Bremen (2018), ZKM Karlsruhe (2018), Museum für Photographie Braunschweig (2018) and Museum Folkwang Essen (2017), among others, as well as internationally at Schaulager Basel (2020), MAK-Center Los Angeles (2017) or (together with Forensic Architecture) at the 15th Architecture Biennale (2016). In 2021 she received the 27th Bremen Award for Video Art and the scholarship Junge Szene of the Kunststiftung NRW.
From January to March 2022, Alina Schmuch was a resident artist in the programme Zu Gast bei Urbane Künste Ruhr in Essen. Until November 20, 2022, her work Amphibische Pfade can be seen at the Museums Böttcherstraße in Bremen.
