DIASPORA IN CONTEXT: CONNECTIONS IN A FRAGMENTED WORLD – IMANTS TILLERS
PRESS RELEASE
Imants Tillers builds his imagery drawing on sources such as:
George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Bernhard Blume, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Mike Kelley, Vytautas Landsbergis, Colin McCahon, Arnulf Rainer, Nicholas Roerich, and Isidore Tillers.
The exhibition centers on the work of Australian artist Imants Tillers, particularly his panoramic painting Diaspora from 1992, which serves as a conceptual statement on the mechanisms of connections and influences in an increasingly unified yet simultaneously fragmented postmodern world. In Tillers’ art, the global art scene becomes a source of information and energy. For instance, Diaspora (305 x 914 cm) consists of 288 individual panels and draws upon over 20 works by eleven artists from around the world.
Imants Tillers was born in Sydney in 1950 to Latvian parents who had migrated to Australia in the late 1940s as part of post-war migration movements. His dual sense of marginality, shaped both by Australia’s geographical remoteness and his Latvian minority heritage, informs much of his artistic practice. This marginality forms a cornerstone of his work. As an artist, he engages with questions of nationality and identity, provinciality and locality, employing appropriation as a deliberate artistic method. By referencing other artists’ works, often via secondary sources such as art magazines and publications, Tillers challenges conventional notions of “authenticity” and “originality,” reframing these concepts in a new light.
Imants Tillers is deeply interested in the comprehensive and open nature of art. For him, art is part of a larger whole, where each artwork is inherently connected to others. His sources of imagery, texts, and information reflect cultural interaction and the intertwining of diverse cultural elements, which together shape the global culture of the 1990s. Tillers examines the mechanisms of our postmodern era—how values and models flow from cultural centers to the periphery, from high culture to popular culture, and how the marginal position is ultimately defined.
The exhibition organized by the Pori Art Museum will also travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington following its presentation in Finland.
The artworks for the exhibition are sourced from various collections across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
The bilingual Finnish and English publication accompanying the exhibition is part of the Pori Art Museum publication series, supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education. Contributors include Australian art historians Graham Coulter-Smith, Bernice Murphy, and Jennifer Slatyer; Australian author David Malouf; French critic Pierre Restany; Cuban art historian and critic Gerardo Mosquera; Danish artist Henning Christiansen; and museum director Marketta Seppälä.
Publication:
ISBN 951-9355-45-6
Diaspora yhteyksissään / Diaspora in Context
Editor: Marketta Seppälä
Planning: Esko Nummelin
Painohäme Oy, Ylöjärvi 1995
Pori Art Museum Publications 28
Translated with ChatGPT