Avenue Patrice Lumumba: Photographs By Guy Tillim at The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
Details:
Avenue Patrice Lumumba: Photographs By Guy Tillim
What:
New Exhibition
Opening:
April 29, 2009 – September 8, 2009
Opening Reception:
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
5:00pm Exhibition Opening and Reception
5:45pm Gallery talk and Book Signing
Free and Open to the Public
Where:
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
11 Divinity Ave. Cambridge, MA
Information: 617-496-1-27
“In many African cities, there are streets, avenues, and squares named after Patrice Lumumba, one of the first elected African leaders of modern times, winning the Congo election after independence from Belgium in 1960…Today [long after his assassination], his image as a nationalist visionary necessarily remains unmolested by the accusations of abuse of power that became synonymous with later African heads of state.”
-Guy Tillim, 2007 Robert Gardner Photography Fellow, Peabody Museum
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology presents a new exhibition and publication,
Avenue Patrice Lumumba: Photographs By Guy Tillim. As the first recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum, Guy Tillim traveled through Angola, Mozambique, Congo, and Madagascar, documenting the grand colonial architecture and how it has become part of a contemporary African stage.
Guy Tillim’s large photographs reveal the decay and detritus of colonialism in Western and Southern Africa on a scale both monumental and slight. He exposes the stains, cracks, and filth of huge, crumbling institutional structures: post offices, schools, offices, hotels, banks. He winds around their staircases and looks through their windows, finding offices and classrooms devoid of basic equipment and furniture. While the people in these images are almost peripheral—at the frames’ edges, with turned backs, or slightly out of focus—there is an acute sense of humanity in the images, shown through the personal objects left behind: an umbrella, a house plant, a purse, a book.
Indeed, as Tillim told an interviewer in 2009, “The buildings are very much inhabited, but many are decaying, so the challenge was not to become a connoisseur of decay, or come up with some sort of Havana-esque vision. I’d thought about this project for quite a number of years, wondered how I’d ever get around to it. Then the Fellowship came.”
(
a. magazine, July 2008.)
The exhibition opens Wednesday, April 29, 2009 and will remain on view through September 8, 2009. There will be a book signing of Avenue Patrice Lumumba: Photographs By Guy Tillim at the opening.