Wolfgang Tillmans’ Fragile, opened on 14 February at the Modern Art Museum & the Goethe-Institut Addis Ababa, doesn’t just speak to the fragility of things or life but goes beyond that to question photography itself.

Tillman’s photos have overcome the burden of photography being a truth, a reality and an evidence of such, both in terms of content and of physical fragility as an object.

“[With] paintings you accept as subject matters, a proposal which you’re not first asking when, what, who, where, why. But the photographs — there’s immediately this question back, this push back as if that helps to validate it; to understand it,” says the artist who is seemingly a little frustrated with the notion of photography as a validation document of something’s presence.

The exhibition in Addis Ababa, that was the fourth tour in Africa on the line after Kinshasa, Nairobi and Johannesburg was exclusively designed for each one of the venues. The photos some framed and many not, were sometimes as large as four meters and other times smaller than ten centimeters leaving the viewer confused between which one is more important and more worth giving attention to.

But what happens when one makes a decision to unframe the photos? They get naked, unprotected and fragile. During a press conference tour, a journalist asked the question “Why didn’t you put your signature on the photos?”. Whether by accident or purpose, the journalist understood that Tillman’s particular work was much closer to a painting (where one usually puts their signature on) than a reality, something that oscillates between fiction and non-fiction rather than an evidence or a document.
Tillmans laughed and responded with a long and complex answer preceded by ‘signatures are no longer considered cool’.

The multidimensional German artist, who spent his youth years studying and partying in London, says that he has always been interested in portraiture as it requires him to be open and vulnerable. The night life scenes, the musicians and performers present in his portraits also speak of his passion to music.

This was not the artist’s first time in Ethiopia. In 2012, he came here on a short visit to work on a long term project titled “New World”. He talks about his special relationship to the term ‘surface’ while pointing at the photo of cattle grazing on a plain green field around Debre Libanos in Ethiopia with a Chinese leather factory as a backdrop.

“Usually in art or in philosophy or thinking, as in relationships, superficial is seen as negative and surface is the opposite of deep but on the other hand, I found that depth can also not be defined. …Now I’ve stayed long enough in Ethiopia to understand it or when can I start talking about it? …..are you just grabbing a picture or are you just superficially looking? Or are you taking or is the picture given to you?”

Behind Tillman’s photographs lies a certain way of thinking and belief, cautiously moving and sometimes pointing out both at the absurdity and the meaning in existence, happening at the same time but in different spaces.

Looking at the collections going as far back thirty years, the works make the viewer question time itself, “What really makes a work timeless and what makes it contemporary?”

One would say that perhaps Tillmans is as superficial as he claims to be. Yes, many of his works may look direct and simple at first glance; but the thought behind them is deep. Tillmans is deep ; Tillmans is superficial.

Main Image: Journalists looking at Wolfgang Tillman’s work “end of broadcast” that reflects on censorship and illusion, at the same time demanding careful observation of things. Modern Art Museum, Addis Ababa. February 2019/Maheder Haileselassie

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