Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Mikhael Subotzky’s ‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape)’, an exhibition of photographs, paintings and installations that inquire into the relationship between landscape, structure and time — how each is marked, recorded, imprinted and inscribed by images, which in turn carry the trails and traces of these abstracted social constructions.
The show marks a significant return to his hometown, a decade after first introducing Sticky-Tape Transfers in his 2014 exhibition ‘Show n' Tell’. The work is concerned with different forms of containment and 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 speaks to what he calls ‘fragments of scopic gazes that collectively surveil A Cape Town Landscape.’ The exhibition brings together images that reveal racist ideology, spatial disparity, and social injustices against a deceptively idyllic and sublime frame.
A authored by Laurence Sydney Wale, the publisher of the ‘Architect and Builder’ Magazine (1951) and founder of the Cape Town Building Centre (1953). Wale’s title evoked Subotzky's childhood memories of the idealisation of landscape, home and belonging. These formative experiences underscore an ongoing investigation into the complexities of urban space and cultural memory in post-apartheid South Africa.
Through a process of deconstruction and layering, what he refers to as a “pick-up sticks” technique — creating a big messy pile and then slowly picking through it over months and years — Subotzky challenges the ideology embedded in, but often obscured by, the seemingly benign idealism of images of landscape and home.
The exhibition's centrepiece is a unique reimagining of a famous 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, ‘A Cape Town Landscape’ (2024), uses his Sticky-Tape Transfers technique to combine a photographic panorama taken from the exact same spot on the Castle’s roof with 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.
Artworks
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The film is projected on the same cello Subotzky’s father taught him on, and played himself in a 1970s folk band called Gateway. Installed in the corner of the gallery, the projection contains shattered and splintered images from Subotzky’s archive that are constantly melting into one another through a counterintuitive use of contemporary AI tools.
The soundtrack is a recently-discovered recording of the only concert that this band ever played in 1970 - a 22-minute composition with lyrics based on ‘Völuspá’ from ‘The Poetic Edda’, a collection of 13th-century Norse mythological poems. By layering conflicting symbols in relation to the musical narrative, Subotzky explores the dissonance of the combination between this particular origin myth, his suburban apartheid origins and the neutered politics of hippie 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 competing histories that are embedded in representations of the landscape and structures of Cape Town. Subotzky’s distinctly unstable images allow for details to arise that are at times unintended or uncontrolled by the artist. Leaning into the dysfunctional representational mechanics of painting, photography and film, Subotzky reveals the burden of narrative and memory that is placed on fragmented unstable images.
Mikhael Subotzky’s (b. 1981, South Africa) 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 representation.
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.
