Doubling back through Wolfgang Tillmans’s substantial retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “To look without fear,” I paused in front of a black-and-white photocopy of handwritten text on spiral-bound paper from 1992. The German words (also the work’s title), translate to “who dares to love lives tomorrow.” Given the artist’s history of photographing friends, lovers, and club scenes as much as political rallies, I took love here to mean something cooperative, what scholar Martin Hägglund, in an interview with Tillmans for the artist’s 2019 guest-edited issue of Aperture, calls “a secular impulse to cultivate our shared life,” even as “interdependence is so painful and constraining under capitalism.” This easily missed work captures the overall impression of kinship that emerges across the exhibition—a kinship that perhaps echoes the political sentiment of the period in which Tillmans found his footing, one that saw the continental shifts of German reunification and the formation of the European Union.

Occupying the entirety of the museum’s sixth floor, the show spans decades, assembling everything from Tillmans’s early Xerox explorations, signature portraits, object studies, and abstract photochemical pieces to his forays into video and more recent post-Covid pictures. The photographer’s signature wall presentations of different-size works hung at varying heights compacts the sheer density of the work. In nearly every room, save those devoted to moving image work, the salon-style amalgamations form image communities that not only play with viewers’ expectations of scale, thematic relation, and display (most unframed works are hung with tape or clips), but also toy with our sense of the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the ephemeral. Tillmans asks us to meander through potential narratives. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois writes in one of the many insightful contributions to the exhibition catalogue, with these installations, “we are invited to play as well: we are summoned to draw links, to imagine connections.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.