C-print on aluminum, scratched

signed, titled, dated, numbered (ink) on mount verso

In search of the hidden

A person disappears. He is removed from visibility, no longer has a picture of himself. The Viennese photo artist Marko Lipuš owns a single photograph of his grandmother from the 1930s. She is sitting on a bench next to her husband Franz Lipuš; a young couple is looking at the unknown photographer, a proud, confident expression in their faces, Maria somewhat smiling, mild, soft. A few years later this woman disappears in the concentration camp Ravensbrück; her life there dries up, without pictures or commentary, in the darkness of a brutal killing machine.
The photograph from the early days of her marriage preserves the image of a woman whose life can only be traced tentatively. The starting point for her grandson's research is the field post letter from the camp to the widower, which is owed to the martial furor of a logic of annihilation and succinctly communicates her death. The way to the concentration camp, the two years in the barracks, the question of the reason for her deportation remain hidden. Just as one preserved picture holds the small spark of a short life and perhaps transmits it to the descendants as a vague idea, so the grandson entrusts his search for the hidden to the visual medium of photography. For him, the image is a store of memory, a preservative of the unseen and an instrument for digging in unlifted sedimentary layers. In the sense of a documentary visual language, photographs would be evidence of reality and testimonies of real events. Lipuš, however, expands the possibilities of the photographic image with an additional, interpretive component; his iconic rhetoric is that of speech and contradiction, of image and meta-image, of view and insight. For this reason, he does not create photographs that convey view and reality in the image, but rather edits and interventions that change and disturb the original image. Marko Lipuš considers his photographic images to be prima materia, from which he appropriates the motifs through manual manipulation and direct interventions.

The scars of the pictures

The picture of Babica, the lovingly Slovenian-designated grandmother, is of tender intimacy and serene calm. A quiet double portrait, like countless portraits sealed in the vault of temporality and sacrosanct in the unshakable duration of its message. The photos that Marko Lipuš has brought back from his various journeys in the footsteps of his lost grandmother are different. Even the photographs tell of the passing of time, of the crumbling of buildings, of the unhappy nature of a place that nature is taking back to help pay off the debt. Then the photographer changes his pictures. The countless documents of the sight of the place of horror are compressed into a few, few images. They tell of the paths the doomed men and women walked, the cobblestones they walked on, the walls they touched, the openings that gave them a view outside. The artist draws these enlarged views, they are not only for contemplation and contemplation, they are for penetration and working away. The beautiful, abstract colour compositions of wall structures and tile patterns, of monochrome floor surfaces and graphic lineaments are torn open and scratched, particles are dissected and line settings are etched into them. Marko Lipuš can only counter the superficial harmlessness of ruin aesthetics with his own violent activity: He covers the authentic testimonies of the unplaces with a network of wounds and injuries, leaving the images behind, with scars and fissures.

The skin of the father

Remembrance and the preservation of memories underlie the literary work of Florjan Lipuš. Through the figure of his pupil Tjaži, he draws traces of his own youth and his feelings of powerlessness in the face of authority, whether in the family, school or the Catholic Church. The young boarding school pupil counters the violence with his own means: scratching. At first it is an act of defence and rebellion against corporal punishment, but then it becomes a means of appropriation: the scratch marks are characteristic. The notching of signs left by one's own actions on the surface of objects and bodies is a mode of identity-foundation. Even if in the case of the young Tjaž this signals rebellion and defence, the scratch subjects these objects to his direct treatment, imposes on them through the injury the unmistakable mark of his intervention.

In the first chapter of his photographic work "Babica", Marko Lipuš devotes himself to a similar appropriation strategy. In large colour photo panels he shows parts of the skin of his father's arms, hands and other parts of his body. Florjan Lipuš, one of Maria Lipuš's two sons and just six years old when she was taken to the concentration camp, is the contemporary witness and custodian of his mother's heritage, which he in turn passes on to his son. Marko now continues this connection by touching the surface of his father's skin: He covers the near-sighted skin photos with a criss-cross of scratches and incisions. With sandpaper the closed part of the epidermis is opened, roughened, injured, disturbed. Pores, hairs, pigment spots, redness are amalgamated to form a pictorial whole; the uppermost, outermost, most sensitive layer of the human being is shown vulnerable and sore.

Places beyond perception

Further and further inside, more and more inside, the paths lead the photographers on the trail of the hidden, in search of paths, relics and signs of the disappeared. One chapter of his multipart photo essay is dedicated to the objects that were found in the camp. Metal cups, brushes and combs are isolated from their surroundings by the photographer and presented like still lifes of the New Objectivity. As they too bear the traces of extinction, they are as intimate carriers of messages from the disappeared as the stone slabs that still hold the echo of their steps. Marko Lipuš prolongs the sober presence of the objects into the meaningful through his continued drawing: the objects vibrate and shimmer in their being, they are banal objects and at the same time relics charged with references. They have left the places, the sites, in order to speak of their former conditions in a different context. And the territory of the camp site becomes a long shot in which the topography of death completely eludes our perception. The means of image alteration and image alienation are - like the manipulations and scratching interventions - synonyms for the marking of the image by the characteristics of one's own presence; only by looking at the camp buildings and the landscape surrounding them was Marko Lipuš himself able to ascertain the visual disturbance that occurs when something that belongs to the sphere of the obscure becomes visible. His dazzling white views are pictures whose motifs seem to have disappeared. Barely recognisable, vague silhouettes protrude from the mist of white colouring, forming gentle connections, visual guesses, after-images of retinal overstimulation up to blindness. The disappearance is not only a process of darkening, of no longer seeing, but on the other hand also a phenomenon of mere presentiments, of vague assumptions, of the remains of images that appear dimly, while all around everything seems to be bathed in glaring backlight.

With the oeuvre group "Babica", Marko Lipuš has set out on a search for the hidden in the picture in memory of his grandmother. The story of her fate is presented in a complex visual language, which on the one hand - using the scratching technique he has been using for some time - has found a correspondence between content and form, and on the other hand explores the greatest possible distance between the photographs depicting reality and their iconic referential character.
(Margit Zuckriegl)