Wolfgang Tillmans is half-rotating on a swivel chair in his Berlin studio. It’s one of the many ways the artist thinks with his body. He’s wearing a baggy white T-shirt printed with luminescent feathers by artist Anders Clausen, the cover art of Spoken By The Other, an EP released by Tillmans and producer Oscar Powell in 2018. The roomy sleeves provide burrows for Tillmans’s restless hands. In other moments, he brings his palms together, as if in gratitude, or points in zigzags, drawing connections in the air.
‘I somehow have this sense of history – of the now being history,’ Tillmans says. ‘And of the history of now being possibly rewritten at any time.’ This notion has permeated the artist’s work for three decades. It’s present in truth study center (2005–ongoing): rectangular tables on which news articles, scientific reports and Tillmans’s own photographs are neatly configured under glass. The evolving project contemplates how society produces, contains and abandons facts, what Hannah Arendt called ‘fragile things’ in her 1967 New Yorker article ‘Truth and Politics’. In a recent iteration of truth study center at Art Twenty One in Lagos, Nigeria – from where Tillmans has just returned, after installing the show – a printout of a Guardian article on microplastics found in human lungs was displayed near two plastic wrappers from Itsu zen’water bottles.
The title ‘truth study center’, Tillmans explains, was always ‘absurd, an impossibility’. Growing up gay, in ‘discord’ with convention, meant he was ‘naturally vaccinated against any pretensions of purity’. He soon learned ‘that there are two ways of looking at things’. Tillmans began using the alias Fragile when he started making music as a teenager. He tells me that by the time he had reached the age of 14, in 1982 – ‘before I was gay, even’ – he was acutely aware of the AIDS epidemic. Alongside his fascination with astronomy, he began to collect articles about the disease from the Frankfurter Allgemeine. This unusual interest was driven by an admixture of scientific curiosity and intuition. ‘I somehow felt this was relevant,’ he remembers, ‘this idea of a virus attacking the very cells that are there to protect you. I felt it was a significant image.’