Lot 476: Guy Tillim SOUTH AFRICAN 1962- Leopold a

Guy Tillim
SOUTH AFRICAN 1962-
Leopold and Mobutu series 6: The statue of Henry Stanley which overlooked Kinshasa in colonial times. It rests on a steamboat that
belonged to the African International Association, a company publicly charged by Leopold with a philanthropic and 'civilising' mission
that veiled its true purpose of annexing and exploiting natural resources. The statue was removed during the Mobutu period of
Africanisation in the 1970s and dumped in a government transport lot in Kinshasa. The boots belonging to the statue are found in
another lot, September 2003
signed and numbered 2/5 in pencil in the margin
archival pigment ink on 300g cotton paper
diptych: paper size 61 by 158,5cm

Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu , 12 May to 19 June 2004
OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria, Biennale Cuvée, 2008

LITERATURE
Adam Hochschild. (2004) Guy Tillim: Leopo d & Mobutu , Bégard, France: Filigranes Éditions, unpaginated.
Guy Tillim spent July to September 2003 photographing traces of the colonial occupation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium and
vestiges of more recent plunder under Mobutu Sese Seko. Tillim's images, frequently composed in diptychs and triptychs, juxtapose
historical sites in the Congo and Belgium with contemporary views of the DRC. Adam Hochschild, author of the highly acclaimed King
Leopold's Ghost, writes: 'Rare is the photographer whose work so well captures not only the country before his camera's lens, but also the
country of a hundred or more years ago.'