Wolfgang Tillmans: Burg / Truth Study Center / Wolfgang Tillmans

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To mark the launch of the contemporary art journal Jahresring’s sixty-fourth annual edition, Wolfgang Tillmans was in conversation with critic and writer Sean O’Hagan at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Titled "What Is Different?," this edition of the publication, which is printed in English and German by Sternberg Press, has been guest-edited and designed by the artist. All of this from a single photo by a photographer who made his career capturing people being free in simple and often misunderstood photos. Additionally, as LGBT men, sexuality has been a significant piece of both Tillmans and Ocean’s artistry, and both have done incredible jobs representing and advocating for their community. The two are so like-minded, their collaborations feel like natural continuations of things they’ve both been doing for their whole lives. Militant would be a bit extreme to describe Tillmans’ new approach to life and photography, but he definitely was more open/forward about being an advocate for LGBTQ communities, as well as HIV/AIDS awareness.

Created specially for the galleries at IMMA, Rebuilding the Future expandedon the artist’s unique approach—not only to making artworks, but also to the design of exhibitions as a way to develop the experience of the work and amplify a particular perspective. More than one hundred pieces encompassing photography, sound, moving images, and works on paper were installed with special consideration of the architectural structure and atmosphere of the museum, making full use of the wall space and of relationships between the works in a given room as part of the overall narrative of the show. Tillmans also presented an immersive new sound work, I want to make a film (2018), which engages with concerns about the speed and development of personal technology; the piece debuted in a solo exhibition at David Zwirner. Stoppard, Lou. “Interview: Wolfgang Tillmans.” SHOWstudio, 10 Apr. 2017, www.showstudio.com/projects/in_camera/wolfgang_tillmans.

War Requiem is performed by the combined forces of an 80-strong chorus, a children’s choir of 40 from Finchley Children’s Music Group, the full ENO Orchestra, a chamber orchestra, and three soloists. Communal spaces, people, animals, and still-life studies of nature or food are just some of the subjects that feature in Neue Welt. Seen together, these images offer a deliberately fragmented view. Rather than making an overarching statement about the changing character of modern life, Tillmans sought only to record, and to create a more empathetic understanding of the world.

A Book for Architects was also featured in a solo exhibition of the artist's work at the Dům Umění– Galerie Současného Umění České Budějovice in the Czech Republic. Icestorm (2001). Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans. Image courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London People take everything for granted now and we have to be aware that what we enjoy is fragile because there are always people who are pushing against it. Fundamentalists, far right people and extreme capitalists all push against the space that we enjoy…AIDS has always been in my life since I have been an adult. It has featured in my work in a way, but I'm aware of the fragility of life.” Being diagnosed with the same disease that had taken his partner’s life in such a short time shook Tillmans to his core, and left him with a new outlook on life.

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In recent years, Tillmans has been more directly involved in political activism. In tandem with his ongoing Truth Study Center project (begun in 2005), he has created posters for the anti-Brexit campaign in Britain and in response to right-wing populism in Germany. Always in the good hands of Eugen Ivan Bergmann at the Between Bridges space in Berlin, we held events around Brexit and related subjects, the refugee crisis and the rise of populism and right wing extremism across Europe. Now, the full story of what Endless is, why it exists, and what it did for both Frank Ocean, AND the music industry as a whole, is a long and complicated tale that deserves its own article (the EXTREMELY short version is: Frank finessed a major label. Like I said, it’s complicated), BUT the part that pertains to this long ass story is that Endless was when Ocean asked Tillmans if he could use his photo for another upcoming album. Tillmans agreed and the rest is history. Portraiture has been central to Tillmans’s practice for three decades. For him, it is a collaborative act that he has described as ‘a good levelling instrument’. No matter who the sitter – a stranger or someone close to him, a public figure, an unknown individual, or even the artist himself – the process is characterised by the same dynamics: of vulnerability, exposure, honesty and always, to some extent, self-consciousness. Tillmans sees every portrait as resulting from the expectations and hopes of both sitter and photographer. Benjamin Britten, War Requiem, English National Opera, London Coliseum, London, 16 November – 7 December 2018

But at the end of the day, for me, it’s also an incredibly ordinary thing,” he concludes. ​ “Here are two lads sharing akiss. What could be more normal than that?” This enigma also stems from the raw vulnerability of Tillmans’ voice. Whether lyrically playful or introspective, it is always giving: intimately unfolding as in the surprising take on Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘El Condor Pasa’ or shapeshifting in ‘Can’t Escape into Space’ or fully naked as raw material expression in ‘Kantine’ and ‘Ocean Walk’. Joining the production team as designer and making his ENO debut is the Turner Prize-winning artist and designer Wolfgang Tillmans. ENO Music Director Martyn Brabbins conducts this new production created to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War. ENO Artistic Director Daniel Kramer’s contemporary staging seeks to examine and process the grief of the incomprehensible loss of life from wars past and present, offering us all a hope for the future.is not a retrospective. Each room in the exhibition has been specially configured by Tillmans as a personal response to the present moment. Ever conscious of his role as an artist, his works engage us with themes of community and sociability, empathy and vulnerability. These works made around the studio demonstrate Tillmans’s concern with the physical process of making photographs, from chemical darkroom processes and their potential to create abstract pictures without the camera, to digital technology that is vital to the production of contemporary images, and the paper onto which they are printed. Tillmans’s understanding of the material qualities of paper is fundamental to his work, and photographs can take on a sculptural quality in series such as Lighter, 2005–ongoing and paper drop, 2001–ongoing, seen later in the exhibition. Jobey, Liz. Wolfgang Tillmans: the Lightness of Being. 25 June 2010, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jun/26/wolfgang-tillmans-serpentine-photographs-exhibition