14 May - 26 June 2009

It isn't easy to define the work of South African photographer Guy Tillim whose solo show at extraspazio is his second hosted by the gallery. We may certainly consider Tillim a photographer of crises, transitions, of humanity at the crossroads. Of identity in perennial change. But these terms don't do justice to his uniqueness. The artist keeps well away from the world of great statements and the world of ceaseless self-pitying chirruping. For those who want to understand right away, Tillim's sotto voce approach may even seem offensive.
After a stint as a young war photojournalist, Tillim has preferred to look at the everyday life of an Africa (but not only) that lives in the interstices between great dramatic events and the theatricality that often results. To look and not to judge. As in his images of the series Congo Democratic, shot in July 2006 during the first democratic elections in what had formerly and improperly called itself the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On that occasion Tillim didn't document clashes and bloodshed but concentrated on minimal, everyday situations side by side with the great event. Like in a war film without soundtrack, he succeeds in rendering alienating even the few shots he allowed himself of the delirious and exalting crowd.
The images of the new series in the show, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, shot between 2007 and 2008, represent a sort of "walk through Avenues of dreams" that is undertaken by the artist - once more - in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as in Angola, Benin, Ghana, Mozambique and Madagascar. Tillim pays tribute to the loss of a great man, Patrice Lumumba*, and of a great opportunity for Africa. His eye captures and holds the fragility of a country made up of architectural remains, destroyed colonial monuments, public buildings, great rundown hotels, subsidised housing, private residences, public parks, schools and universities to which sporadic human presences bear silent witness. A scenario which seems to have difficulty in containing the calamities of the DRC's last fifty years of history.

An indubitably African landscape, seen with a sense of mourning for a dream that never came true, and transformed by the photographer's eye into a kind of interior landscape, silent, of great beauty, almost sacred. The results, as always with Guy Tillim, are images of persistent elegance.

(*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.)

extraspazio gallery presents the exhibition Avenue Patrice Lumumba, already shown at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, as a preview of the circuit of FotoGrafia - festival internazionale di Roma.
Guy Tillim is also the author of the exhibition Roma città di mezzo for the 2009 edition of the festival, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 29th May - 2nd August.

Guy Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962. Lives and works in Cape Town.
He received important awards, such as the Leica Oskar Barnack Award for the Jo'burg series, in 2005 and the DaimlerChrysler Award for Photography, South Africa in 2004.
His solo exhibitions include Jo'burg et Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 2009; Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Fundãçao Serralves, Porto, 2009; Congo Democratic, extraspazio, Roma, 2007; Petros Village, Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Roma, 2006 | Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2006; Leopold and Mobutu, Photographers' Gallery, London, 2005; Jo'burg, Rencontres Photographiques de Bamako, Mali, 2005.
Among his most recent group exhibitions: Face of Our Time, SF MOMA, San Francisco, 2008|09; Documenta XII, Kassel, 2007; Global Cities, Tate Modern, Londra, 2007; 27° Biennale di San Paolo, Brasile, 2006; Africa Remix, sedi varie, 2004|07; Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York, 2006.