Did you know that Galileo made his first telescopic observations of Venus in October 1610? Pictured here: "Venus transit" (2004) from 'Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,' published by @themuseumofmodernartâ â Michelle Kuo writes: "Stars are facts. We have proof of their existence; we can measure them; we see them with our own eyes. We believe in them. But stars also test our belief: it wasnât so long ago that we thought they revolved around us, or that they were divine, or occult, whether heavenly spheres or Heavenâs Gate. â â Stars still oscillate between science and fiction, astronomy and astrology, truth and myth. Maybe this is why, in Wolfgang Tillmansâs photographs, the stars never look the same. Our star, the Sun, may appear as a ghostly orb, obscured by the noise of an old photocopy; or it might rise as a bright disc, punctuated by the shadow of a passing celestial body. In other pictures, stars burn like ours, but they are tiny and remote, fast traces of ancient light. Or they are pixelated and adrift, products of a massive telescopic system and its alien calculus.â â As Tillmans tells it, he became enamored of the night sky when he was a child. His first photographs were taken through a telescope in his bedroom. Astronomy, the oldest of the observational sciences, was for Tillmans an intimate encounter with the impossibly distant, the unknowable, the object of mechanical vision and the subject of endless speculation and mystery.âŚ"â â Edited with text by @roxanamarcoci â Text by Quentin Bajac, @yvealainbois @juliaqbw1 @clement_cheroux @durgapolashi @stuartcomer Keller Easterling, Paul Flynn, Sophie Hackett, Michelle Kuo, @oluremi.onabanjo @i_phil_taylor & @wolfgang_tillmans Chronology by Phil Taylor & Andrew Vielkind.â â Image courtesy the artist, @davidzwirner New York / Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne, @maureenpaley London â â #wolfgangtillmans #wolfgangtillmansmoma #wolfgangtillmanstolookwithoutfear #tolookwithoutfearâ #venustransit #wolfgangtillmansvenustransit #wolfgangtillmansvenus https://www.instagram.com/p/CjOSjxrpXUd/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
