Heartbeat/Armpit

Directed by Wolfgang Tillmans

Heartbeat/Armpit (2003) is a looped digital video just under two and a half minutes long and with no sound, a rare format in Tillmans’s artistic world. At first glance, this piece with its stringent composition and seeming calm seems to resemble a photograph. What we see is a cropped section of an angled overhead shot of a young man lying bare chested on a carpet.On closer inspection minimal movements can be discerned within this harmonious composition. These minute movements attest to the fact that he is alive: we intuit his breath and heartbeat from the fact that his chest rises and falls gently, and the artery in his neck pulsates.