Vivien
Merchak

I was born 1979 in Ilmenau, former GDR my mother was German, my father is Syrian. 

In 1989 we had two flee the GDR overnight and started new in West Germany as refugees. This event affected me deeply and shaped my curiosity for the fate of people- from an early age I explored art and literature-  the biographies of the artists were fascinating and I got immersed into drawing and writing.

I studied architecture at the University of Wuppertal/ Germany and Politecnico di Milano/ Italy, afterwards I studied art at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf/ Germany. In the course of my studies I lived in Italy and Portugal, traveled to Syria many times to get to know this part of my identity.

I developed a documentary interest for the things I experienced and the people I met. I wanted to collect these facts and put them together in collages of texts and pictures and obviously this way of approaching my experiences led me to photography. After years of experimenting with different analouge cameras and developing my pictures in darkrooms I found my medium: the medium-format camera Rolleiflex from the early 60ies. 

The photographs are a view through my eyes. A personal confrontation with the world in which I move.What is remarkable, memorable, archival. Sensory impressions are often overwhelming and almost intangible, a sensory overload that makes it impossible to discover beauty in the details. Through photography, I approach my surroundings in smaller steps. I reduce the scale and focus on parts that I understand that would otherwise go unnoticed and give them meaning, sometimes grotesque and amusing, sometimes moving or sober.

My topics concentrate on street photography, daily scenes, identities and unseen architecture. My work is about keeping memories, against the vanishing.

I live and work as an architect and photographer in Zurich/ Switzerland.