Sylvia Wynter Foyer
In the Sylvia Wynter Foyer, the entrance hall of HKW, you can see, among other works, works by Akinbode Akinbiyi and Wolfgang Tillmans. In the following section, we will give you an overview of the two artists and their works in the exhibition.
Akinbode Akinbiyi
Akinbode Akinbiyi has been photographing life in different cities with a Rolleiflex camera since the 1970s. His work has taken him to Lagos, Cairo, Berlin, Dakar, Johannesburg, Chicago, and Bamako. For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, he wandered through São Paulo, particularly the Bom Retiro neighbourhood, where part of his work was also exhibited at Casa do Povo alongside the Bienal, as well as the neighbourhoods of República, Sé, and Vila Madalena.
A travelling artist and photographer, Akinbode explores his immediate surroundings in search of narratives. Anything can spark his interest, from seemingly insignificant rubbish discarded on the street to the grandeur of a majestic tree. Stories are his primary concern, as are the quiet cadences of what is barely heard, what remains at the margins, or only partially revealed.
For Akinbode each moment is precious and unrepeatable: what appears under a particular light is transformed into another image in the very next instant. His practice of wandering is deeply intuitive: it arises from an impulse that emanates from the solar plexus, from an intimate place within himself.
In the foyer, we encounter 24 large-scale black-and-white photographs. Each is printed on a fabric panel measuring two-by-two-metres and suspended in the space so that you can move between them. A different photograph appears on each side of the panels, so as you walk through the installation, new images continually come into view.
Taken in the Bom Retiro neighbourhood of Sao Paulo, the photographs move between everyday street scenes and moments of collective life at Casa do Povo. They capture encounters with architecture and vegetation, as well as gatherings, performances and collective singing.
In the photographs taken at Casa do Povo, a cultural centre located in Bom Retiro, the artist documents different moments of gathering, creation, and collective life.
In one of these images, Akinbode portrays Hugueta Sendacz, the 99-year-old choirmaster of Coral Tradição, who is also shown conducting the choir in another photograph. Active at Casa do Povo since 1988, the Coral Tradição choir sings exclusively in Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora. Conducted by its 99-year-old choirmaster, Hugueta, its repertoire includes folk songs, protest songs, love songs, and lullabies. Through collective singing, the choir has found a way to keep people connected while preserving the memory of Yiddish culture, continually fostering encounters between generations.
Overall, the photographs reveal the neighbourhood as a space shaped by attention, gesture, presence, and shared experience.
Printed on suspended fabric, the photographs acquire a soft, tactile quality, while the double-sided format allows new images to emerge with every step through the installation. As we move among them, we repeat Akinbode’s own gesture: wandering, observing, and absorbing fragments of everyday urban life, allowing stories to reveal themselves to the attentive passerby.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans explores alternative ways of presenting images. For him, the way photographs are displayed is just as important as what they depict, creating constellations in which images influence one another’s meanings.
He is also widely known for his contributions to popular culture—including the cover of Frank Ocean’s album Blond—and his photographs have become part of a universal visual imagination of youth.
His images extend beyond documentary photography to create spaces of intimacy and connection. By observing everyday moments and their traces—a room after a party, the view from an airplane window, folds in a sheet of paper—Tillmans transforms ordinary scenes into visual poetry. Rather than providing definitive narratives, his works invite ambiguity, interpretation, and emotional resonance.
In this iteration of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Tillmans presents a video installation created especially for the exhibition, Watching a Minute for a Minute.
Two perpendicular walls become large projection surfaces for the artist’s photographs and videos. Images appear individually or in pairs, trios, and layered combinations, alternating between still photography and moving image.
The images range from fish lying on mud, streams, rivers and coastal landscapes to urban scenes, railway tracks, an apartment interior, and personal belongings inside a cupboard. Water repeatedly appears in different forms, while sounds of flowing water and birds accompany a voice in English describing the Earth’s rotation in real time. Elsewhere, the ticking of a clock and the sound of human breathing accompany the changing images.
As each image encounters, follows, or merges with the next, unexpected relationships emerge. The soundscape is equally varied: natural sounds blend with the hum of engines, while layers of electronic music alternate with fragments of voices that evoke choral singing. Rather than illustrating the images literally, sound generates tension, resonance, and unexpected contrasts.
Throughout the installation, water appears in many physical states, revealing its omnipresence and its influence on human experience. The work constructs an architecture of images and sounds in which physical space and projected space become inseparable. Open-ended and processual, it invites attentive looking and sustained presence, encouraging reflection on the ways we produce, circulate, and share images and sounds in the contemporary world.
You can also find Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs throughout the exhibition space. These images likewise engage with rivers, bodies of water, seas, and oceans: dry riverbeds, waterways that cut through cities, pollution and places of encounter, intimacy, and celebration. They remind us that humanity emerged through its relationship with water, and that water made the development of civilizations possible. Throughout these works, rivers and seas appear as silent yet essential protagonists in our shared history.