Entries (RSS) Guy Tillim: Avenue Patrice Lumumba
Guy Tillim’s most recent body of work examines the modern history of Africa through its civic architecture. Avenue Patrice Lumumba travels through several countries in Africa, including Mozambique, Angola and The Democratic Republic of Congo. 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 but was assassinated in 1961. Streets that bear his name have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream. A widely respected and established photographer, South African based Guy Tillim has received a number of awards and grants for his photography. These include the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005 and the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in 2006. Avenue Patrice Lumumba is also exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris and the Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal, with further works by Tillim shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
As Tillim describes this work, “These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist colonial structures, but a walk though 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.” MORE FROM GUY TILLIM ON davidkrutpublishing.com: |
