MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY

The show marks a significant return to his hometown, a decade afterfirst introducing Sticky-Tape Transfers in his 2014 exhibition ‘Shown’ Tell’. The work is concerned with different forms of containmentand surveillance humans have embedded within the landscape,pulling together the history of the city through its colonial prisons,slave labour camps, and forts as well as its natural terrain. It speaksto what he calls ‘fragments of scopic gazes that collectively surveilA Cape Town Landscape.’ The exhibition brings together imagesthat reveal racist ideology, spatial disparity, and social injusticesagainst a deceptively idyllic and sublime frame.

The title for the show excerpts a historic architectural publication;‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa: Plans and Pictures ofArchitect-Designed Houses’ authored by Laurence Sydney Wale,the publisher of the ‘Architect and Builder’ Magazine (1951) andfounder of the Cape Town Building Centre (1953). Two large paintings— ‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa I and Home Building Ideasfor South Africa II’ — draw from Wale’s title which, upon discovery,evoked Subotzky’s childhood memories of the idealisation oflandscape, home and belonging. These formative experiencesunderscore an ongoing investigation into the complexities ofurban space and cultural memory in post-apartheid South Africa.Through a process of deconstruction and layering, what he refersto as a “pick-up sticks” technique — creating a big messy pile andthen slowly picking through it over months and years — Subotzkychallenges the ideology embedded in, but often obscured by, theseemingly benign idealism of images of landscape and home.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is a unique reimagining of a famouswatercolour painting by Scottish travel writer, artist, and wife ofthe first British Colonial Secretary at the Cape, Lady Anne Barnard.Her image depicts a panoramic view of Cape Town, painted fromthe roof of her residence at the centre of the Castle of Good Hope.Subotzky’s 9.5 metre-long installation, ‘A Cape Town Landscape’(2024), uses his Sticky-Tape Transfers technique to combine aphotographic panorama taken from the exact same spot on theCastle’s roof with Barnard’s original. This process weaves a complexvisual narrative, (re)capturing Barnard’s gaze some two centurieslater while revealing the interplay between colonial fantasies andphotographic realism.

The show also debuts a new film installation, ‘Cello Piece (or TheOccult Significance of Blood)’ (2024). The film is projected on thesame cello Subotzky’s father taught him on, and played himself in a1970s folk band called Gateway. Installed in the corner of the gallery,the projection contains shattered and splintered images fromSubotzky’s archive that are constantly melting into one anotherthrough a counterintuitive use of contemporary AI tools. Thesoundtrack is a recently-discovered recording of the only concertthat this band ever played in 1970 - a 22-minute composition withlyrics based on ‘Völuspá’ from ‘The Poetic Edda’, a collection of13th-century Norse mythological poems. By layering conflictingsymbols in relation to the musical narrative, Subotzky exploresthe dissonance of the combination between this particular originmyth, his suburban apartheid origins and the neutered politics ofhippie counterculture that was a backdrop to his upbringing.

‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape)‘confronts the unique topography of shared and competinghistories that are embedded in representations of the landscapeand structures of Cape Town. Subotzky’s distinctly unstable imagesallow for details to arise that are at times unintended or uncontrolledby the artist. Leaning into the dysfunctional representationalmechanics of painting, photography and film, Subotzky revealsthe burden of narrative and memory that is placed on fragmentedunstable images.

Mikhael Subotzky’s (b. 1981, South Africa) works are the results ofhis fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social,historical, and political narratives that surround him. As an artistworking in film, video installation, and photography, as well as morerecently in collage and painting, Subotzky engages critically withcontemporary politics of representation.

Subotzky’s solo exhibitions include ‘Epilogue’, Goodman Gallery,London (2022); ‘Tell It To The Mountains’, A4 Foundation, CapeTown (2021); ‘Mikhael Subotzky: WYE’, Sherman Contemporary ArtFoundation, Sydney (2016); Ponte City (with Patrick Waterhouse),National Galleries, Scotland, UK, then travelled to Le Bal, Parisand FOMU, Antwerp (2014). Recent major curated exhibitionsinclude ‘Global(e) Resistance’, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021) and’Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography’, The Barbican,London (2020).

Collections include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York;Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Galleryof Art, Washington; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the SanFrancisco Museum of Modern Art; and the South African NationalGallery.