Goodman Gallery presents Epilogue - Mikhael Subotzky’s first solo exhibition in London. Epilogue continues the artist’s critical engagement with the instability of images and the politics of representation.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new film, titled Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent (2022), which is the third in a trilogy of films following Moses and Griffiths (2007) and WYE (2012). Accompanying it are a series of paintings and sticky-tape transfers that were products of the film’s animation process, before evolving on their own terms.
The film departs from the 17th century - a moment when the so called “Dutch Golden Age” and “Enlightenment” in Europe coagulate with the international slave trade, imperialist extraction, and the colonisation of South Africa. Subotzky is interested in how the art and literature at the time, through the 20th century and into the present moment, have both reflected and actively contributed to the colonial project. Interweaving the greater historical and political narrative of the film are two highly personal narratives that grapple with Subotzky’s relationship with his own father, and a man called Hermanus.
Chapter one sees a reworking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp’ which intuitively leads to the Dutch ships sailing out of the ‘Dead Man’s Stomach’ and towards The Cape of Good Hope.
Chapter two, titled ‘The Dutch Gangster’ is based on dual representations of the “real” and “fake” Jan van Riebeeck, one of which, erroneously attributed and depicting another man, found its way on to the apartheid currency as he was canonised as the “father of the nation” by the white nationalist agenda.
Chapter three, titled ‘George Fading’ is a short interlude based on a photograph Subotzky took of his father walking into the sea during the early stages of motor neurone disease, and an account of his later funeral. The final chapter is the ‘Chorale’, in the style of a traditional cantata, where the film’s themes are brought together and recapitulated and its images are reorganised into a summary and provocation.
Epilogue features Hermanus van Wyk, an important collaborator in Subotzky’s work since 2005. The complexity of their relationship that reflects a history of fraught class and race relations in South Africa is engaged in their conversation. Hermanus has made a journey with Subotzky, from an initial chance encounter and documentary photograph to playing a role in WYE (2012) as a fictional character loosely based on himself.
In Epilogue Hermanus tells his own story in excerpts from a three day conversation with Subotzky that was filmed in the winter of 2021 and are interspersed throughout the chapters of the film. In tandem with Subotzky’s personal narrative and placed within the charged historical context that the film addresses, these words form a powerful meditation on father figures, laced with violence, pain, and just a hint of the possibility of redemption.
Artworks
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Artist Bio
Mikhael Subotzky’s (b. 1981, Cape Town) works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical, and political narratives that surround him. As an artist working in film, video installation and photography, as well as more recently in collage and painting, Subotzky engages critically with contemporary politics of images and their making. “At the heart of my work is a fixation with revealing the gap between what is presented (and idealised) and what is hidden, coupled with a desire to pull apart and reassemble the schizophrenia of contemporary existence,” he says.
Subotzky’s first body of photographic work, 'Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners),' was an in-depth study of the South African penal system. 'Umjiegwana (The Outside)' and, 'Beaufort West' extended this investigation to the relationship between everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa and the historical, spatial, and institutional structures of control. 'Retinal Shift' was produced by Subotzky on the occasion of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2012 and toured South Africa’s major museums and critically engaged with his ambivalence towards the processes of representation and image construction. 'Ponte City,' a collaboration with artist Patrick Waterhouse, focuses on a single 54-story building that dominates the Johannesburg skyline. The building is cast as the central character in a myriad of interweaving narratives that, through photographs, commissioned texts, historical documents, and urban myths, chart the convoluted histories of both the building and Johannesburg itself. The 'Ponte City' exhibition, which consists of a single installation of thousands of photographs and documents, has been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the accompanying publication won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.
Subotzky’s work has been exhibited in recent museum presentations, 'The Struggle of Memory' at Palais Populaire, Berlin (2024) and, 'Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection' at Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2024).
Notable solo and two-person exhibitions include, 'Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape),' Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2024); 'Epilogue,' Goodman Gallery, London (2022); 'Tell It To The Mountains,' (with Lindokuhle Sobekwa) A4 Foundation, Cape Town (2021); 'Mikhael Subotzky: WYE,' Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2016); 'Ponte City' (with Patrick Waterhouse), National Galleries, Scotland, UK, then travelled to Le Bal, Paris and FOMU, Antwerp (2014).
His work was included in the 12th Cairo Biennale (2010), The Unexpected Guest, Liverpool Biennial (2012), Rencontres Picha Biennale de Lubumbashi, Lubumbashi (2013) and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, Venice (2015).
Public collections include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the South African National Gallery, among others.
Subotzky lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
