Wolfgang Tillmans Drops Dance Anthem ‘We Are Not Going Back’

Wolfgang Tillmans b. 1968, Germany Follow +

German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has released a new song in support of people whose civil liberties, including LGBTQ+ rights, are under threat.

Accompanying the release is a video directed by Tillmans that weaves together footage shot by his grandfather Karl R. Tillmans’ in New York in 1939 and Germany in 1949.

‘Some paint a rosy picture of the past whilst forgetting that many people simply were not free, and inequalities were rampant,’ Tillmans told Kaltblut magazine.

‘When I thought about those views of the past, the chorus including “no turning back the clocks” came to me, thinking in solidarity, we can’t possibly want to return to those times, however nostalgic we might feel about parts of them.’

Tillmans began experimenting with music in 1985, two years before he bought his first camera.

His first release 2016 /1986 EP featured three songs digitised from cassette recordings that Tillmans made with the help of music producer Tim Knapp (responsible for this latest release) in 1986.

In 2016, Tillmans’ track ‘Device Control’ was included in Frank Ocean’s visual album ‘Endless’. That same year, Tillmans photographed the American singer-songwriter—donning a green, cropped haircut—for the cover of his album Blonde.

The release of ‘We Are Not Going Back’ precedes Tillmans’ exhibition of new and recent photographs at David Zwirner during Art Basel Hong Kong.

It’s his first exhibition in Hong Kong since 2018, and runs alongside his major travelling retrospective To look without fear, which is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through 3 March 2024. —[O]

Main image: Wolfgang Tillmans, Moviment (2023) (detail). Inkjet print, 40.6 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz.