Mikhael SubotzkyA Cape Town Landscape, 2024
A Cape Town Landscape (1800-2024) is a unique reimagining of a well-known watercolour painting by Scottish travel writer, artist, and wife of the first British Colonial Secretary at the Cape, Lady Anne Barnard. Her image depicts a panoramic view of Cape Town, painted from the roof of her residence at the centre of the Castle of Good Hope. Subotzky’s 9.5 metre-long installation uses his Sticky-Tape Transfers technique to combine a photographic panorama taken from the same spot on the Castle’s roof with a scan of Barnard’s original. This process weaves a complex visual narrative, (re)capturing Barnard’s gaze some two centuries later while revealing the interplay between colonial fantasies and photographic realism.
The work is concerned with forms of containment and surveillance embedded within the city’s terrain, drawing on histories of colonial prisons, slave labour camps, and military forts alongside its natural topography. Through its layered construction, it evokes what Subotzky describes as “fragments of scopic gazes that collectively surveil A Cape Town Landscape.” The result is an image that unsettles the deceptive idyll of the city, revealing instead the ways racist ideology, spatial disparity, and social injustice have been inscribed into its frame.
