Guy Tillim

Eröffnung: 17. April 2008, 18-20 Uhr

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Guy Tillim (born 1962) has been acclaimed in recent years for extraordinary images taken in Africa, in the fractured territories of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Angola and the urban centres of Johannesburg and Kinshasa. While Tillim trained as a photojournalist his work transcends the documentary impulse to offer profound insights into the contemporary African condition, finding revelatory beauty in the mundane (and often terrible) actuality of life there. Tillim says: 'Of course, there is always this: to change what is ugly and brutal into something sublime and redemptive: So I have photographs I like for reasons I have come to distrust. I learned my trade as a photojournalist but feelings of impotence in the face of other's despair led me to look away, as if catching only obliquely their reflected light.’ His images are, in the artist's formulation, of 'another nature: disquiet, introspection, wonder'.

Renate Wiehager has written: 'It can be said of Guy Tillim that his artistic approach is formulated on the tricky border between empathy and distancing. His travels through the countries of southern Africa are not dictated by pre-arranged goals. They seem to be guided by a quality of attention, unprejudiced at first, to the conditions and environments that people have brought about themselves, and that equally, they are placed in [..] Tillim's images derive from a disciplined avoidance of everything that has always been believed before, and any form of painting things in black and white.'

Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962. He started photographing professionally in 1986 and joined Afrapix, a collective of South African photographers with whom he worked closely until 1990. His work as a freelance photographer in South Africa for the local and foreign media included positions with Reuters between 1986 and 1988, and Agence France Presse in 1993 and 1994. Tillim has received many awards for his work including the Prix SCAM (Societe Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) Roger Pic in 2002; the Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award (Japan), 2003; the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African photography and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005. He has had solo exhibitions at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2004); Photographers Gallery, London (2005) and the Museo di Roma (2006). Recent important group exhibitions include Documenta 12 (2007); Global Cities, Tate Modern, London (2007); the São Paulo Bienal (2006); Snap Judgments: New positions in contemporary African photography, International Center of Photography in New York (2006) and the travelling exhibition Africa Remix, Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (2004-2007). His work is currently being shown in a solo exhibition at the Haus Fuer Kunst Uri in Altdorf, Switzerland and he will be included in Home Lands / Land Marks: Contemporary Art from South Africa at Haunch of Venison London, 29 May – 5 July. Guy Tillim was recently awarded the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Tillim's work is in important international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; National Museum of Photography, Denmark; South African National Gallery, Cape Town and Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Guy Tillim