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Guy Tillim is one of the incredibly talented photographers who put South Africa on the contemporary art world map.
A few months before the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence from Belgium, Extra City --an Antwerp-based platform for the production, presentation and debate of artistic practices-- is showing one of Tillim's recent series: Avenue Patrice Lumumba. The work examines modern history in Africa against the backdrop of its colonial and post-colonial architectural heritage.
The series reflects on the architecture of colonial and post-colonial Africa, looking at the many city streets named after Patrice Lumumba, one of the first elected African leaders of modern times. Lumumba became the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960 after he helped his country win independence from Belgium. Only ten weeks after his speech at the independence celebrations in Léopoldville in which he militated against the West's idea of neo-colonial order in the presence of the Belgian King Baudouin, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup. He was imprisoned, beaten and murdered in circumstances that strongly suggest the complicity of Belgium and the CIA. The country quickly fell into the totalitarian regime of charismatic and greedy Mobutu. Streets that bear the name of Lumumba in Mozambique, Angola and The Democratic Republic of Congo have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream.
"These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist 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
It was a fascinating exhibition for me. My school teachers in Belgium were not big on telling us what exactly happened in Congo, except that we got tremendously rich thanks to the rubber, diamonds, copper and other minerals of our ex-colony. My eyes opened when i went to study in England and my class mates were happy to provide me with gruesome details of the atrocities done the Belgian over there. Check out Mobutu King of Zaire too (i downloaded an english version of the documentary recently but it was so badly translated i'd recommend the original version in french.) More images. Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba, a collaboration between ExtraCity and the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren, is open until October 25, 2009 at Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium. |
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A few words about the most fascinating book i read this Summer... Photojournalist Geert van Kesteren covered Operation Desert Fox (the code-name for a four-day bombing campaign on Iraq in December 1998) for the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland. On his second visit to the region he managed to get an exclusive interview with Uday Hussein, Saddam's son (who was killed a few years during a brief gunfight in Mosul). He returned to Iraq in April 2003 and spent several months working on assignments for international newspapers and gathering images and information for Why mister, Why?, a photography book that aligns clues to help us understand what went wrong during the American occupation.
His more recent volume, Baghdad Calling documents the lives of Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. After a few weeks taking pictures, Van Kesteren realized they didn't manage to convey the sufferings he was witnessing. However, he quickly found that many refugees had used their camera phones to collect images of the homeland they knew they would have to leave.
Besides his own professionally shot images, the book presents hundreds of the photographs that Iraqi citizens had accumulated on their mobile phones and digital cameras. The images often reveal places where journalists dare not tread for reasons of personal safety. Since 20 March 2003, Iraq has indeed been the deadliest country in the world for the press. More than 180 journalists and media support workers have been killed. Nowadays, photographers and journalists have to stay within Baghdad's Green Zone, lest they are kidnapped or killed.
Besides van Kesteren's own photos and the amateur snapshots, the book contains many interviews with refugees. For once, the principals protagonists take control over the narrative. Their first-hand accounts of the horrors that have befallen them makes a compelling reading. Unfortunately, these very short stories do not seem to have any happy ending in sigh. There's no morale. Not even romance. Coupled with images of corpses laying in the streets, family celebrations, exploded cars, desert squares in broad day light, empty schools and demolished infrastructure, the testimonies of displaced families creates one the most engrossing forms of photojournalism i ever came upon.
Baghdad Calling is an appeal to those countries of the Western coalition to shoulder their responsibilities and afford the Iraqis some hope of a better future.
Brigitte Lardinois, who used to be Cultural Director at Magnum Photos London wrote in her forewords to the book: "Van Kesteren collected data. This book is therefore a new departure in photojournalism. Many photographers are looking for ways to enhance the power of their message. They are forced to do this by a dearth of editorial outlets in the West. Assignments from magazines and newspapers seem to be dwindling, challenged by the new media offering interesting means of telling stories and conveying information. "It is notable that photographic books can be seen as a medium that is heading in new directions. Now that magazines are showing less interest in probing stories, photographers are turning to autonomous production of a medium tailored to their personal wishes and vision. A book is a wonderful medium for this, as are websites and multimedia. There is agreater leeway to explore stories in depth, to add nuance, broach aspects for which no space is available in conventional media such as a magazines and newspapers."
Check out the exhibition Baghdad Calling until September 13 at the Photo Museum in Antwerp. The Independent has a picture gallery. So does Photoeye. You can also leaf through the book. Related stories: Book Review - Shoot An Iraqi, Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, Positions in Flux - Panel 1: Art goes politics - Wafaa Bilal, Why do people desire walls? |
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More goodies from the exhibition Theatres of the Real - Contemporary British Photography which opens until September 13 at the Museum of Photography in Antwerp.
Photographer Danny Treacy recovers discarded clothing he finds lying around in streets, car parks and waste ground. He then stitches the garments together into uncanny suits, which he wears in life-sized portraits to become Them. Looming out of the black background the faceless figures evoke urban warriors, mythical beasts, distorted creatures. It seem that something that happened to its former owner emanates from each piece of fabric, making the attire all the more haunting.
See also Thorsten Brinkmann´s self-portraits. |
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More notes from my latest visit to the Museum of Photography in Antwerp. Theatres of the Real - Contemporary British Photography, one of the exhibitions currently hosted by the art space, presents recent work by eight photographers working in Britain. I was expecting grim images and socially-engaged topics. I got that, mostly as the photos definitely belong to the British documentary photo genre. However, something has changed in the brit doc world. The curators of the exhibition describe this new breed of photo works as belonging to the category of 'post documentary'. The prints had indeed a sense of 'artificial reality', an authenticity but staged for the camera, constructed. Through a blurring the real and the imaginary they offer us a vision of contemporary Britain that is both profound and comical; a black comedy in which bankers throw themselves to their solitary deaths off city buildings, where the police prepare for social insurgency in artificial urban environments, and where mundane kitchen sink scenarios compete the strange plasticized interiors of offices and shopping malls.
I was particularly drawn to the work of Sarah Pickering. She developed the series Incident while she was Artist in Residence at the UK Fire Service College from 2006-8.
The b&w photographs document the interiors of purposely-designed buildings that have been repeatedly set on fire then extinguished, for training exercises that simulate emergency incidents. The matt finish of the prints echoes the carbon-covered surface in the spaces. The blackened scenes look nothing like what we'd imagine. Rather than then being cluttered by debris and ruins, these locations are eerily tidy. They are burnt, yet almost immaculate. Objects are schematic as they are designed to be charred again and again while maintaining an identifiable shape. Photo on the homepage: Escalator, 2008. |
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I'm still madly in love with Antwerp. The enchantment starts right as i step out of the train and marvel at the way train tracks are stacked on top of each other in the magnificent train station. After that i head to Walter van Beirendonck's shop hoping that he'll ask me to marry him, we'll talk for hours about the most flattering wedding suit for him and i'll spend the rest of my life combing his beard.
Right! Back to reality. I'm not exactly Walter's type, my boyfriend is the best bf in the whole galaxy and the subject of this post was one of the fantastic exhibitions i saw at the Photo Museum in Antwerp yesterday. In 2007 and 2008, Belgian freelance photographer Nick Hannes traveled across the former Soviet Union by bus and train in search of remnants of the region's Communist past and signs of recent social transition and evolutions. He visited Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and brought back images that bear a lot of nostalgia for the past, a capitalism that might have spread a bit too fast in some cases, a few vodka and blondes clichés we'll never get tired of, some amazingly beautiful landscapes and a time that seems to pass at varying speeds.
To say that the former Soviet Union has become uniformly wrapped inside a depressing shroud of grey haze is telling only a half-truth. In Siberia, there is sunshine. Many people sincerely believe in the prospects for a better future. These contrasts, telling of extreme wealth in the midst of gut-wrenching and heart-rending poverty, images of modern day dictators like golden calves surrounded by the remnants of faded glory, run like a persistent red thread throughout the story of "Red Journey". In suburban districts, deprived neighbourhoods bordering train stations, on beach fronts and fairy grounds, the photographer is searching for tableaux that break through the mould that forms the stereotype image of the region. Red Journey is on view until September 13 at the Foto Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. |
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I love Antwerp. I think the Fashion Department at its Royal Academy is the best in the world, its art scene is never dull (the MoMu, Museum of Fashion, is currently showing that Paper Fashion exhibition i reviewed a few months ago), i like shopping there, people are friendly, plus there's a harbour and i have that thing about sailors.
As i wrote on Sunday, one of the reasons i visited Antwerp is that i had never seen the Museum of Photography. This is going to be one of my regular stops. The exhibitions i checked out last week are now closed but the upcoming ones look great. There's going to be Geert van Kesteren's Baghdad Calling/ Why Mister, Why? and Theatres of the Real. British photography today. They both open on June 19, 2009. There were 4 exhibitions last week. Two i liked a lot, one that was as ok as i expected and a last one i was not so much into. I already mentioned how much i admired the talent of Jimmy Kets. But my happiness didn't stop there. On the 4th floor of the museum, I fell head over heels in front of the six channel video installation, East of Que Village, of Yang Fudong.
The images of East of Que Village are miles away from the ones that the international press showed during their coverage of the Olympics last Summer. The film attempts to depict the sense of isolation and loss increasingly present in China's contemporary society as communities are scattered, traditional rural villages dissolved, and the fight for survival takes precedence. The imagery is of a desolate and hostile landscape, the host to a group of wild dogs fighting a merciless life-and-death struggle for survival, with only a sporadic presence of human life and social values.
The b&w video installation is mesmerizing rawboned dogs walk in the wind and get into fights, people inside their home are quietly performing routine activities, and the landscape is fiercely inhospitable.
But the pièce de résistance at the museum at the time was the solo exhibition of Erwin Olaf. His work is indeed bound to fascinate audiences. It talks of gender issues, sex, violence, body, entertainment, fashion, beauty, darkness, death. Some of his most provocative series were on display: Chessmen, Blacks, Mature, Fashion Victims, Royal Blood, Paradise 'the Club', Separation, Paradise Portraits, New York Times Couture, etc.
The photos that shocked me the most by far are part of the Mature series -not because i find them scandalous but because i can very well imagine me with that kind of body within a few years and i'm vain and time passes so fast. Women of a certain age (read, at least 70 years old) pose as Playboy pinups, with a bikini, bath foam, or their wobbly skin as only attire. Their identity is reduced to just a name and the first letter of their surname, they are Kate M., Cindy C., Anna Nicole S., Christy T., Claudia S., etc. There's something magnificently defiant in their attitude. Are they beautiful? Ridiculous? Inspiring? Outrageous? You are the judge.
Olaf's video and photos Le Dernier Cri gives another, almost blunter, view of what alternative beauty can be. The bourgeois, chic and polite protagonists wear elegant face adornment that are all the more frightful that we are use to associate this kind of flesh accessory with body mod-addicts. Video Le Dernier Cri: I'll end with my favourite series by Olaf: Separation. I don't need to comment on this one.
Small extract of Olaf's video Separation: You can see some images of the exhibition space on Jordan Hellemans Photography. |
