Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most important artists in the global panorama of contemporary art, and named this year by TIME magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, presents in this edition of Electra a series of photographs taken in recent years that have never been published . The essay, written by Afonso Dias Ramos, explores and places these images in the context of a renowned work dating back more than four decades.
WANDERING BODIES, TRAVELING IMAGES And in dark times, Will it also be sung? Yes, it will also be sung. About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht, «Motto», 1939
Wolfgang Tillmans is probably the author in contemporary photography who has generated the greatest impact among the new generations of visual artists. He has had recent retrospectives at MoMA in New York (2022), at Tate Modern in London (2017) and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2012–13), and has just been named by TIME magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. In this portfolio that he presented to Electra, Tillmans selected and distributed across the pages a series of never-before-seen photographs taken in recent years. They are constellations of images that run through each other like a nomad's diary, a fugitive set of casual notes, loose gestures or accidental encounters, as he traverses places like Accra, Porto, Lagos or the Vatican. But this journey never forms a map, much less leads to a story. Rather, it is a matter of launching a probe along the paths he takes, reporting on objects, landscapes, people and works in an apparently random, although carefully studied, way, based on the mutual interrogation of the world and photography. This act of observing calls for the dilution between the spaces of his studio and the external reality, measuring, testing, questioning and manipulating what he comes across and what he composes. The result resembles an index of the paths the artist navigates on a daily basis, giving rise to a network of images that, however, never have a clear taxonomy or obvious conjugation.