SPACE 52, ATHENS, GREECE, 3-6 June 2021

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“Life Guarding” is based around water metaphors, both in the track’s lyrics and in its visuals. It is a film-collage by Tillmans, edited by Michael Amstad, that explores shifts its lens “between micro and macrocosms, collages of body parts, fruit and insects, we find him equally paying attention to the waves of the Atlantic Ocean as well as to the ‘same’ water in the form of drops, evaporating on a hot kitchen plate”.

Though Tillmans is a renowned photographer and artist, he is no stranger to music. He has released a handful of EPs since 2016 under his own name and with the group Fragile, and in 2018 worked with UK experimental producer Powell on the Spoken by the Other ‎EP. Most notably, his track “Device Control” bookended Frank Ocean’s 2016 visual album Endless.

“Life Guarding” was written by Tillmans with collaborators Tim Knapp and Jay Pluck in early 2019 at Trixx Studios in Berlin, and later produced with Tim Knapp and Bruno Breitzke. The track is part of a double A-side 12”, alongside the track “Growing”, and is also the first glance at an upcoming album by Tillmans.

By Selim Bulut, written for Dazed, published: 21st August 2020

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/50206/1/wolfgang-tillmans-life-guarding-new-track-stream

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Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968, Remscheid, Germany) is an artist living and working in Berlin and London. Since the early 1990s he has created work that offers a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium and his practice, increasingly working with sound and moving images. The artist has had prominent solo exhibitions at numerous international institutions since the early 1990s and his work is held in museum collections worldwide. A major retrospective of Tillmans’ work will be held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2022.