Michael Stevenson - Guy Tillim

Guy Tillim
Avenue Patrice Lumumba

10 July - 23 August 2008

Michael Stevenson is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Guy Tillim in July/August 2008.

Tillim's new body of work reflects on the civic architecture conceived in the idealism of the last years of colonialism and the immediate post-colonial period in Africa. In the French and Portuguese colonies, in particular, modernist architecture was used expressly to convey the ideology of the era. The utopian colonial vision was flawed, and the structures were a strange and fragile hybrid of aspirations and ideas that were not necessarily applicable to Africa. However, through subsequent shifts in power this architecture has been absorbed into an indisputably African reality, and today these buildings and civic spaces are an integral component of contemporary African culture.

In many African cities, streets and avenues and squares were named after Patrice Lumumba, one of the first elected African leaders, winning the Congo election after independence from Belgium in 1962. After his assassination in that year, and the rise of dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko, he has been increasingly deified as a liberator-in-chief of independent Africa, his image as a visionary unmolested by accusations of abuse of power that became synonymous with later heads of state. The streets and civic spaces built in colonial times that now bear his name have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream.

Tillim, in his photography, resists focusing on the formalism of the architecture and instead considers its changing use over the past half-century. He also resists viewing the buildings reductively as symbols of domination or as representative of the general decay of African institutions, but rather seeks to acknowledge the complexity of their histories.

Tillim embarked on this project as the recipient of the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography granted by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in the United States.

Avenue Patrice Lumumba will be shown in 2009 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, France; Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal. A book will be published by Prestel.

In 2008 Tillim has held solo exhibitions at Haunch of Venison in Zurich and Haus für Kunst in Altdorf, Switzerland, and has been included on Biennale Cuvée at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria; the Hereford Photography Festival - Contemporary Photography from South Africa Part 2 - in the UK; and Presumed Innocence: Photographic Perspectives of Children at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Massachusetts, USA.

Avenue Patrice Lumumba runs concurrently with Ângela Ferreira: For Mozambique and Manthia Diawara: Maison Tropicale. The exhibitions open on Thursday 10 July, 6 - 8pm. The gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and Saturday from 10am to 1pm.

Private residence, Kolwezi, DR Congo, 2007
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Corner of Almeira Pibeiro and Patrice Lumumba Avenues, Maputo, Mozambique, 2007
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Lubumbashi City Hall, DR Congo, 2007
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