Guy Tillim: Hotel Universo

The first, from which the exhibition gets its name, focuses on the built environment, reflecting the ways in which history and the passage of time are inscribed through the processes of construction, maintenance and disrepair. The images were taken in Mozambique, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2003 and 2007, their abstracted form offering the viewer a window through which to observe the brick-and-mortar residue left by the collapse of regimes. Tillim states:

'I didn’t determinedly set about photographing vestiges of colonial power. I was simply fascinated by the place I found myself in, the sensation of it, and the feeling of being utterly lost in fact, so different was this environment from the one I grew up in.'

Second Nature, taken in French Polynesia between June 2010 and March 2011, places emphasis on that region’s natural landscape. In the making of Second Nature I, the initial iteration of these works, Tillim described a fascination with the area’s ability to elude convincing representation. Reading through debates, including those had by the artists who accompanied Captain James Cook's 18th century voyages, Tillim remarked at their parallels with present questions about the complexities of judgment and control around image-making. To one such question, ‘How much do you “give” a scene and how much do you let it speak for itself?’ Tillim now responds:

'In the end my solution was to try and - I know this sounds trite, but - let the place speak through me, as it were; speak for itself, in other words. To my mind this meant looking for some kind of equality of the elements that I was looking at through the camera - the sea, the mountain, the palms. Not to trade in clichés, or to say too emphatically what was photographed.'