Current Review(s)
Second to none
Guy Tillim at STEVENSON in Cape Town'I know Tillim as a war photographer, so I’m just trying to get used to this,' says a tall blond man to an equally tall blonde woman in heels standing near me in the front room of the Stevenson gallery in Cape Town. The man is right – there are certainly some things to get used to. To be sure Tillim has again, in the second chapter of a body of work he has entitled ‘Second Nature’, moved away from the themes of his earlier work. However, like the previous rendition of this series, shown at Stevenson last year, the forms and subjects are not wholly unfamiliar.
29 February 2012 - 30 March 2012
The Formality of Joburg’s Other Side
Guy Tillim at STEVENSON in JohannesburgLiving in Johannesburg, if you believe many of its white residents, is like living next door to the apocalypse. The city centre, we frequently tell one another, is beset by armies of homeless people lining pavements like the undead after the disappearance of the sun; that its town-planning dysfunction would make a Brazilian favela feel better about not being so left-brained; and that hijacked building slums abound, breeding the next generation of car hijackers. If we were given to poetry, we products of privilege would surely intone ‘the end is nigh’ over our lamb chops and lager, as the suburban sun set behind our Jeep-shirted shoulders.
22 May 2014 - 27 June 2014
Listings(s)
Avenue Patrice Lumumba in Berlin
Guy Tillim at Kuckei + Kuckei‘Avenue Patrice Lumumba’ is an examination of modern history in Africa against the backdrop of its colonial and post-colonial architectural heritage. It travels through numerous African countries, including Mozambique, Angola and The Democratic Republic of Congo.
In this project, photographer Guy Tillim departs from the late-modernist architectural structures that shaped the colonial landscape of conflicts in recent decades. However, the transitional and hybrid sceneries and spaces he depicts do not merely testify to conflict and an oppressive past, decay and violently contested ideologies. They speak equally of the aspirations for liberation and progress in the post-colonial era.
30 April 2010 - 03 July 2010
Editions for ArtThrob Print Exhibition
Guy Tillim, Jane Alexander, Lisa Brice, Peet Pienaar, David Goldblatt, Penny Siopis, Hentie van der Merwe, Robert Hodgins, Tracey Rose, Mikhael Subotzky, William Kentridge, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at South African Print GalleryEditions for ArtThrob is pleased to announce an exhibition of all artist prints in our collection at the South African Print Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town. You are cordially invited to attend the opening finger lunch at 11:30am on Saturday the 29th of August, where all available prints will be for sale.
Editions for ArtThrob, in collaboration with South Africa’s leading artists, has developed a series of specially-commissioned prints; these are sold to cover the running costs of the ArtThrob website. ArtThrob is South Africa’s leading website on contemporary art, and is an important point of reference worldwide for curators, dealers and those interested in South African art.
Artists who have participated in the in the print program include William Kentridge, Penny Siopis, Robert Hodgins, Jane Alexander, Willem Boshoff, Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko, David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Lisa Brice, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Mikhael Subotzky, Peet Pienaar, Hentie van der Merwe and Tracey Rose.
In addition, we will be launching a brand new print by Robert Hodgins. Hot off the presses at Mark Attwood’s studio, the image will be available for preview the at exhibition opening.
Please contact Natasha Norman from ArtThrob for online orders or Gabriel Clark-Brown at the SA Print Gallery for more information.
29 August 2009 - 28 September 2009
Guy Tillim at Extra City, Belgium
Guy Tillim at Extra City: Kunsthal AntwerpenExtra City presents the project 'Avenue Patrice Lumumba' by Guy Tillim in collaboration with the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren a few months before the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence from Belgium.
'Avenue Patrice Lumumba' is an examination of modern history in Africa against the backdrop of its colonial and post-colonial architectural heritage. It travels through numerous African countries, including Mozambique, Angola and The Democratic Republic of Congo.
'Avenue Patrice Lumumba' showed previously this year at FOAM_Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
06 September 2009 - 25 October 2009
'Breaking News: Contemporary Photography from the Middle East and Africa'
Bob Gosani , Guy Tillim, David Goldblatt, Jodie Bieber, Daniel Naude, Pieter Hugo and Mikhael Subotzky at Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena'Breaking News' presents the third group of acquisitions for the international contemporary photography, art film and video collection of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena. Curated by Filippo Maggia, this major survey features 21 artists from 12 countries. 'As the title suggests,' says Maggia, 'the idea for this exhibition is to use a selection of emblematic works that recently became part of the Fondazione di Modena collection to shed light on a part of the world that only makes the news with conflicts and bloody events. "Breaking News" is the journalism launch - typical of TV news - that announces the latest news'. Dominated for more than a century by the views induced by colonialism, Africa now expresses a variety of creative voices investigating not only the legacies of the past but also the complexities of the present.
28 November 2010 - 13 March 2011
'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video'
Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo and Sabelo Mlangeni at Cantor Fitzgerald GalleryThe exhibition 'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video' includes photo installations by Sammy Baloji, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Guy Tillim, and video installations by Salem Mekuria and married artists and collective IngridMwangiRobertHutter. Curated by Mellon Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ruti Talmor, the exhibition seeks to complicate representations of Africa through a set of works on cities as sites of convergence of multiple pasts and futures and as collections of changing and changeable sites that may or may not be geographically contiguous.
18 March 2011 - 29 April 2011
'Appropriated Landscapes'
Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Jane Alexander, David Goldblatt, Penny Siopis, Santu Mofokeng, Angela Ferreira, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi and Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse at The Walther Collection'Appropriated Landscapes' explores landscape typologies in South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique, and presents works by fourteen artists, including Jane Alexander, Ângela Ferreira, David Goldblatt, Sabelo Mlangeni, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi, Jo Ractliffe, Penny Siopis, Mikhael Subotzky/Patrick Waterhouse and Guy Tillim.
Many of the artists presented in 'Appropriated Landscapes' have created images through topographical studies, explorations of nomadic peripheries and in-between spaces, or chronicles of social geography altered by divisive spatial planning and modern architecture. The concept of landscape here is not linked to historical notions of the picturesque and the sublime. Instead, the exhibition considers landscape as a prism of experience, a reflection of ideology, and a stage for the performance and perception of identity. Whether sweeping views, architectural compositions, or portraits, the varied works in the exhibition remind us of the density and richness of the notion of landscape, the complexity and subjectivity of its depiction - and ultimately, of our own spiritual, emotional, personal, and political relationship to it.
16 June 2011 - 13 May 2012
'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity'
Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Kay Hassan, Berni Searle, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Hentie van der Merwe, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at The Walther CollectionThe Walther Collection opens to the public on June 17, 2010 with 'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity', introducing works from its African collection. Under the curatorial direction of Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition comprises a series of four projects filling all nine galleries in the three buildings of the new exhibition space in Burlafingen near Ulm, Southern Germany. The exhibition integrates the work of three generations of African artists and photographers with that of modern and contemporary German photography. This combination of African and German works will serve as a model for the kind of curatorial process that animates the character of the collecting program.
Works in the collection include those by Berni Searle, Candice Brietz, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Zanele Muholi, Hentie van der Merwe, David Goldblatt, Kay Hassan, Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe.
17 June 2010 - 17 October 2010
'Second Nature'
Guy Tillim at STEVENSON in Cape TownFor the past year Tillim has been photographing the landscape in French Polynesia. He was drawn to this landscape that has been continuously sketched - and later photographed - since Captain James Cook's voyages in the late 18th century, perhaps because it almost eludes convincing representation. In reading the accounts of the artists who accompanied Cook, Tillim was interested to note that their debates on-board ship around the subject of the representation of landscape are very similar to those we have today: how much do you 'give' a scene and how much do you let it speak for itself? In this regard, he explains his own difficulties in finding a way through this binary because of our strongly conditioned notions of the frame and the picturesque:
"In making photographs of the landscape, I have to confront the difficulty of actually seeing the landscape. It's a space that changes its face with a glance or a ghost of a thought. Perhaps there is a way of creating a sort of enhanced participation of a viewer moving through the space of this possible image where various elements are neither obvious nor not obvious. The impulse to convey vista and unknowability in relation to my insignificance in the scene is almost overwhelming. When I lift the lens to my eye, I hesitate. Perhaps we look for certitude in clichés, those motifs often inappropriately used in describing landscape, that tend to isolate some elements to the negation of others. Perhaps the scene is only beautiful when all the elements are palpably part of the whole. A political position - here is a bulldozer or a filthy gutter in paradise - is untenable.
So I return to what seem like some basic principles, and invariably the clichés. There are obvious ways to convey the components of the scene: either through detail or monumentality. But what of that which lies in-between, the indeterminate space that conveys the texture of the place, its feeling, its sensation, its quotidian elements alongside the spectacular? I think there isn't an answer, because in and of itself each scene is a place of meditation, of emptiness. It provides its own context because in a certain way of looking it cannot be anywhere else. What is photographed? Nothing, and everything, when you have no desire to leave the frame."
27 July 2011 - 03 September 2011
'Libreville'
Guy Tillim at STEVENSON in JohannesburgSTEVENSON presents new work by Guy Tillim. This is the artist's first solo exhibition to take place in Johannesburg in a decade.
Tillim's latest series of photographic images, taken in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, in 2012, draws on the formal and aesthetic concerns of his 'Second Nature' series, as well as the ongoing interest in power and ideology in Africa that informed his 'Avenue Patrice Lumumba' and 'Congo Democratic' series.
Here, Tillim considers the construct of our perception of space in a city landscape, situated amidst the realities of an African capital and, inevitably, described through the prism of Africa's colonial past. The irony of the name of the city, with its complicated relationship to autocracy and democracy, permeates Tillim's images of this urban landscape, as do the markers of power that recur throughout his work.
14 March 2013 - 19 April 2013
'Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life'
Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Sue Williamson, Jane Alexander, Omar Badsha, David Goldblatt, Peter Magubane, Santu Mofokeng, Ernest Cole, Jurgen Schadeberg and William Kentridge at Haus der Kunst'Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life' is a photographic exhibition examining the legacy of the apartheid system and how it penetrated even the most mundane aspects of social existence in South Africa, from housing, public amenities, and transportation to education, tourism, religion, and businesses. Complex, vivid, evocative, and dramatic, it includes nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines, newspapers, and assorted archival documents and covers more than 60 years of powerful photographic and visual production that forms part of the historical record of South Africa. Several photographic strategies, from documentary to reportage, social documentary to the photo essay, were each adopted to examine the effects and after-effects of apartheid's political, social, economic, and cultural legacy.
Curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, the exhibition proposes a complex understanding of photography and the aesthetic power of the documentary form and honors the exceptional achievement of South African photographers.
From the work of members Drum Magazine in the 1950s to the Afrapix Collective in the 1980s to the reportage of the so-called Bang Bang Club, included in the exhibition are the exceptional works of pioneering South African photographers including Leon Levson, Eli Weinberg, David Goldblatt, Peter Magubane, Alf Khumalo, Jürgen Schadeberg, Sam Nzima, Ernest Cole, George Hallet, Omar Badsha, Gideon Mendel, Paul Weinberg, Kevin Carter, Joao Silva, and Greg Marinovich, and the responses of contemporary artists such as Adrian Piper, Sue Williamson, Jo Ractliffe, Jane Alexander, Santu Mofokeng, Guy Tillim, Hans Haacke, and William Kentridge. In addition, the exhibition will feature the works of a new generation of South African photographers such as Sabelo Mlangeni and Thabiso Sekgale, who explore the impact of apartheid as it continues to resonate today.
15 February 2013 - 26 May 2013
'Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age'
Guy Tillim and Others at Barbican Centre'Constructing Worlds' brings together eighteen exceptional photographers from the 1930s to the present day who have changed the way we view architecture and perceive the world around us.
From the first skyscrapers in New York and decaying colonial structures in the Congo, to the glamorous suburban homes of post-war California, and the modern towers of Venezuela, we invite you on a global journey through 20th and 21st century architecture. Featuring over 250 works, this exhibition highlights the power of photography to reveal hidden truths in our society.
Includes Guy Tillim, Berenice Abbott, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lucien Hervé , Andreas Gursky, Stephen Shore and Julius Shulman, and the work of iconic architects such as Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, and Frank Lloyd Wright, amongst others.
25 September 2014 - 11 January 2015
'Second Nature II'
Guy Tillim at STEVENSON in Cape TownThe second half of Tillim's 'Second Nature' was taken in São Paulo in 2011. In many respects, these images of the contested urban terrain of a megalopolis appear to be the antithesis of the Polynesian landscapes of the first half of the series, with their reverence for nature and awareness of the elements of water, wind and light. Yet, on closer looking, it becomes clear that Tillim is seeing and perceiving the landscape of these two strongly contrasting places in the same way. In all these images he does not offer the conventional point of focus or easily identifiable subject that is the standard premise for photography; instead, he gives equal treatment to the many elements that comprise an image. A person walking is not more important than a signpost, or a sculptural tree, or a zebra crossing, or a strange building; the eye roves across the image and is entertained by these identifiable aspects but never halts and concludes that this element is the reason for the image. As a result, one is never sure what is actually being photographed, yet one's eye remains engaged and active within the frame of the image. The paradox that Tillim is photographing nothing yet everything, and that he conflates the notions of subject and object, reminds us that the premise for the 'Second Nature' series is not the qualities of the landscapes of Polynesia or São Paulo, but the way we perceive them.
29 February 2012 - 30 March 2012
'Perspectives 1'
Guy Tillim, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, Albert Adams, Alexis Preller and Others at STEVENSON in Cape TownSTEVENSON presents the first exhibition in a series titled 'Perspectives', opening up a new aspect of shows at the gallery.
Michael Stevenson dealt extensively in 19th and 20th century South African art in the 1990s, until the opening of the gallery focusing on contemporary work in 2003. Going forward, the gallery will again present periodic exhibitions, titled Perspectives, which offer post-war South African and African works as well as more recent works by contemporary artists.
These exhibitions will be co-ordinated by Darren Levy who is a partner at the gallery. His interest in contemporary art has been long-standing, and his intention is for these exhibitions to have a quiet sensibility linking the works rather than a hard curatorial framework. In this way the viewer can experience the works individually and collectively in a way that is spacious visually and conceptually. Levy writes:
My perspectives are as collector, reader and dealer, and yours may or may not, coincide. Our prisms will be similar and different. I wish to encourage the act of looking and to personally feel the impulses and prompts of the artworks, without any prescriptions. In the words of Helen Sebidi, 'works themselves provide the narrative'.
This first 'Perspectives' exhibition has been built around Albert Adams' triptych South Africa 1958-59 (Deposition), a seminal work in the history of South African art. One has to remind oneself that it was painted 65 years ago because it resonates so strongly with the works of contemporary artists like Wim Botha and Helen Sebidi. To this end, there are works by Penny Siopis, Alexis Preller, Berni Searle, Guy Tillim and Natasja Kensmil that also allude to liminal realms on the threshold of existence, and experiences and states we can sense but seldom explain.
22 July 2014 - 23 August 2014
'Avenue Patrice Lumumba'
Guy Tillim at Museum of Contemporary PhotographyIn his project 'Avenue Patrice Lumumba' (2007–08), Guy Tillim records the architecture and infrastructure of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Patrice Lumumba (1925–61) was one of the first elected African leaders in modern times. Tillim avoids intense action entirely, and instead focuses on the architecture, landscape, and people in African countries where the legacy of colonialism forms a backdrop but does not capture the essence of individual lives unfolding. His pictures portray the crumbling institutional buildings—post offices, schools, hotels, and offices—that were built by colonial governments in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Mozambique. These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist-era colonial structures, but a walk through avenues of dreams. Patrice Lumumba’s dream, his nationalism, is discernible in these structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments.
10 January 2011 - 06 March 2011
‘Joburg: Points of View’
Guy Tillim at STEVENSON in JohannesburgSTEVENSON presents new work by Guy Tillim. In ‘Joburg: Points of View’ the artist returns to the city which he last photographed a decade ago.
At that time, Johannesburg offered a provocation to Tillim's understanding of documentary photography and debates around representing a politically contested landscape. More recently, the artist has been increasingly interested in notions of judgment and control around image-making, which he explored in ‘Second Nature’ (2011-12). In this series of images taken in Polynesia and São Paulo, the viewer is not offered a conventional point of focus or easily identifiable subject that is the standard premise for photography. Instead, the paradox of photographing nothing yet everything, and of observing the resultant conflation of subject and object, becomes the premise for his photography. His next series, ‘Libreville’ (2012-13), pushed this investigation further, bringing the formal concerns of ‘Second Nature’ to bear on an African city that visibly declares its ongoing struggle with ideological power.
Of the new series, Tillim writes:
In 2004 I spent four months in downtown Johannesburg. I saw the city then as a giant puzzle. My plan, to photograph small pieces at a time and put them together to create a portrait, soon seemed pointless in the face of the city's infinite impulses that could not be contained in a manner of my liking. I couldn't see everything and be everywhere. I realised that to suggest some kind of truth, it wouldn't matter particularly where I was, but I'd have to let the place speak through me rather than trying to assign co-ordinates to a piece of puzzle. Of course the uncomfortable question then arose: who was I in this city, in this landscape?
It was this shift or realisation, or sensation, that links the work then to the pictures I took in the city in 2013, setting me off on a journey to make landscapes that would attempt, as far as possible, to be without pointed judgment, on the grounds that my judgment or preconceptions of a landscape, of a mountain or a skyscraper, say, are irrelevant in the face of its immutability. The process of finding an answer would call for making pictures that are more like windows than mirrors or pale reflections. A window's neutrality and its equitability would suggest intangible context; where the frame is no longer a tyranny, where it is an invitation to explore rather than state a claim. The frame cannot escape the question about what it can't see and can't know, but perhaps there's a place where the question simply ceases to arise.
‘Joburg: Points of View’ is comprised entirely of diptychs, pairs of photographs that both animate and freeze a momentary perception. Through the expansion of the field of vision we are compelled to recognise spaces on their own terms, and by the same notion we are called to question our way of looking.
The exhibition will take place in multiple sites around Johannesburg, including the Market Photo Workshop, in addition to Stevenson.
22 May 2014 - 27 June 2014
'Intense Proximity' - La Triennale
Guy Tillim, Meshac Gaba and Nicholas Hlobo at Le Palais de TokyoThe first major event marking the reopening of the Palais de Tokyo in 2012, La Triennale offers a large panorama of contemporary art at the intersection of the French art scene and global sites of production. Beginning within the interiors of the expanded and refurbished Palais de Tokyo, La Triennale is set in a series of overlapping cartographies that shift from small-scale collaborations with emerging research, production, exhibition, and performance spaces in Paris and the surrounding suburb, to explorations of the critical valences between the near and far, between the edges of France and countries adjacent to and bordering them.
Okwui Enwezor serves as Artistic Director of La Triennale, with associate curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karoum, Émilie Renard and Claire Staebler.
20 April 2012 - 26 August 2012
'New Documentary Forms'
Guy Tillim at Tate ModernA selection from Guy Tillim's series Congo Democratic is included in Tate Modern's Level 5: 'New Documentary Forms'. The series documents the 2006 elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, capturing a complex period of social and political change. The five rooms of the exhibition explore the ways in which five contemporary artists have used the camera to explore, extend and question the power of photography as a documentary medium.
18 December 2011 - 31 March 2012
