Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
91.5 x 131.5cm
Editions of 5 + 2AP

These three photographs were taken by Guy Tillim in Porto Novo, Benin. He is currently realising a new body of work that reflects on the civic architecture conceived in the idealism of the last years of colonialism and the immediate postcolonial period. In the French and Portuguese colonies, in particular, modernist architecture was expressly used to convey the ideology of the era. Tillim, in his photography, has resisted focusing on the formalism of the architecture itself and instead considers the effects of repeated shifts in power over the past half-century on the meaning of this architecture. To date he has travelled to Porto Novo in Benin; Kinshasa and Lubumbashi in the Congo; Maputo, Mozambique; Luanda, Angola; and Antsiranana in Madagascar. However, his eye also notices moments and circumstances that are not central to the focus of this series but that he is nevertheless drawn to. These three photographs are cases in point.

Tillim’s Congo Democratic series has recently been included on both Documenta 12 and the 27th São Paulo Bienal, and was also exhibited at Extraspazio in Rome and the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in the past year. His new body of work will be exhibited at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University at the end of 2008 as part of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography which he was awarded last year. A retrospective of his work will be shown at Haus Fuer Kunst Uri in Altdorf, Switzerland, in March 2008 and will travel to other museums including the Cartier Bresson Foundation in Paris. His Congo Democratic series has been selected for the Biennale Cuvée at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria, which opens in February 2008.

© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.