From the beginning, Wolfgang Tillmans has used his practice to subvert photographic conventions and conjure new modes of making and presenting work. His latest exhibition, To look without fear, currently on display at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, offers a vision of his work that centres on the intersection of art and activism. Informed by new scholarship and eight years of dialogue with the artist, curator Roxana Marcoci shares her experience designing the show and why she thinks Tillmans is a pioneer of the medium.
How did you first encounter Wolfgang Tillmans’ work, and what was that experience like?
The memory of when I first saw Wolfgang’s work is still vividly present. It was in 1994 when he had his first show at Andrea Rosen’s Gallery in SoHo. The experience of seeing his photographs and how they were installed was so uniquely powerful that I promised myself to follow this artist’s work. Over many years of working together, and especially through the critical period of Covid-19, he never stopped impressing me as a visionary human being and creator — as an artist-citizen whose approach to art making melds formal invention with an ethics of care.
Why is Tillmans such a pioneer for you?
Tillmans considers his role as an artist to be “an amplifier” of ideas and social awareness, and his practice is animated by a concern with the possibilities of forging connections and the idea of togetherness—a form of “meaningful hedonism.” In works that range from interior still-lifes to documents of social movements, from ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, from sensitive portraits to pictures of architecture, and from astronomical observations to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre imaginable. His engagement with music, video, writing, and social advocacy has created an oeuvre that also transcends the bounds of a single artistic discipline. He is an intrepid polymath who has brought new meaning to photography both in how he understands pictures to be material objects and in how he reinterprets editorial, documentary, and representational genres into unconventional, genre-defying installations.
“Each gallery has its own identity. There are different rhythms and approaches to every room. There are spaces of intense constellations and spaces that provide an unexpected feeling of quietness and peace.”
Tillmans is known for his dynamic presentation strategies – a kind of anti-museology. How did you approach this in your curation of the exhibition?
Tillmans’ essential medium is not just photography but its contexts of activation— publications, magazine spreads, and above all, installations. Wolfgang’s dynamic, anti-hierarchical photographic installations are arranged with the precision and emotional impact of a perfect electronic score. To me, it was essential that we present the full range of Wolfgang’s strategies. Each gallery has its own identity. There are different rhythms and approaches to every room. There are spaces of intense constellations and spaces that provide an unexpected feeling of quietness and peace. Through continual re-arranging, repositioning, questioning and reinforcement, Wolfgang avoids ascribing any conclusions to his work and thus repeatedly subjects his own photographic vision to a democratic re-contextualisation. That aspect is what keeps his work constantly interesting, fresh, and open to endless exegesis.
The title of the show, To Look Without Fear, feels so pertinent to contemporary life. How did you land it, and what does it mean to you?
“To look without fear,” actually comes from a passage in “Look, again” –an interview between the artist and the art critic and musician Dominic Eichler in Frieze (October 2008). In that interview, Wolfgang speaks of the critical power of vision, the eye as a subversive tool. He says: “There is always something unsettling about fearless looking as opposed to coy allusion or shockingly flashing. To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos. Study the soldier or riot policeman, make him an object of formal consideration, see him as wearing drag. Look at things the way they are.”
I wanted us to create an exhibition that would cover the entire arc of Wolfgang’s practice by articulating what fearless looking means. I wanted an exhibition that features the boldness and diversity of Wolfgang’s installation strategies as well as the spectrum of materials and themes that make up his oeuvre. The poignancy of his interdisciplinarity, of a practice situated between discourse networks, is an aspect I wanted to acknowledge in the exhibition.
One of the things To Look Without Fear foregrounds is the political force of Tillmans’s practice. From the early days of representational justice and his proposal for a democratised experience of art to his more pronounced activism. How did you approach this facet of his practice?
In 2017, Wolfgang Tillmans founded Between Bridges, a foundation committed to humanism, solidarity, and the advancement of democracy. Wolfgang has been a staunch advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, Black Lives Matter, refugee and immigration issues, the United Kingdom’s 2016 European referendum, and the sustainability of small cultural institutions through the Covid-years. Cultural and historical events—from musical movements to advancements in camera technologies and from political conflicts to global pandemics—have all played definitive roles in his life and work, texturing nearly 40 years of a career that spans the intimately personal to the cosmological. It was my deep desire and understanding that all these aspects should be represented in the exhibition.
The show closes with Science Fiction, a collaboration between Tillmans and Isa Genzken. It’s an unexpected and dynamic way to complete the exhibition experience. Why was it important to include this work?
I was interested in showing another aspect of Wolfgang’s practice: his collaborative streak. The installation explores the relationship between the social space of architecture and photography—a theme of lasting interest to me. Genzken’s two irregularly gridded, mirrored wall structures create an immersive cascading sequence of reflected images reminiscent of modern design and nightclub aesthetics. Depicting the aftermath of a party bidding farewell to his London studio, Tillmans’s stunning photograph—wake—the largest picture he has made to date, is coloured by the mix of indoor lights, daylight, and the glow of a nitrogen vapour lamp in the neighbouring yard. It evokes the unbridled atmosphere of the party and the feeling of revelry that lingers the day after.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ To look without fear is on show at MoMA until 01 January 2023.
Please note this conversation has been edited for clarity.
