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Administration building, Antsiranana, Madagascar
2007
Guy Tillim
Photography
91,5 x 131,5 cm
"In many African cities, there are streets, avenues and squares named after Patrice Lumumba, one of the first elected African leaders of modern times, winning the Congo election after independence from Belgium in 1960. His speech at the independence celebrations in Léopoldville, in the presence of the Belgian King, Baudouin, unequivocally signalled his opposition to the West's idea of neo-colonial order that would replace overt domination with indirect control. He was assassinated in January 1961 by Belgian agents after UN complicity in the secession of the provinces of Katanga and South Kasai, and a Western power-supported military coup led by Mobutu Sese Seko. Today his image as a nationalist visionary necessarily remains unmolested by the accusations of abuse of power that became synonymous with later African heads of state."
“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 the structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry such memory so well.”
Guy Tillim
“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 the structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry such memory so well.”
Guy Tillim
Guy Tillim
South Africa
Born in 1962
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.
Guy Tillim began photographing professionally in 1986 and joined Afrapix, a collective of South African photographers with whom he worked closely until 1990. His previous publications include Departure (2003), Leopold and Mobutu (2004), Jo’burg (2005), Petros Village (2006) and Congo Democratic (2006). Tillim has received many awards for his work including the Prix Roger Pic in 2002, the Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award in 2003, the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Photography, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005 and the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in 2006. His work has been widely shown on such prestigious exhibitions as the São Paulo Bienal (2006) and Documenta 12 (2007).
Inspired by David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim explores in the early 1980s life under Apartheid. He became a photojournalist in 1986, covering the conflicts in Angola and Rwanda while pursuing his investigations into identity across the decolonized African continent, bled dry by its history.
Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.
Guy Tillim began photographing professionally in 1986 and joined Afrapix, a collective of South African photographers with whom he worked closely until 1990. His previous publications include Departure (2003), Leopold and Mobutu (2004), Jo’burg (2005), Petros Village (2006) and Congo Democratic (2006). Tillim has received many awards for his work including the Prix Roger Pic in 2002, the Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award in 2003, the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Photography, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005 and the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in 2006. His work has been widely shown on such prestigious exhibitions as the São Paulo Bienal (2006) and Documenta 12 (2007).
Inspired by David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim explores in the early 1980s life under Apartheid. He became a photojournalist in 1986, covering the conflicts in Angola and Rwanda while pursuing his investigations into identity across the decolonized African continent, bled dry by its history.
Artwork of
Guy Tillim
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