In WYE, an immersive three-screen film installation, Mikhael Subotzky treads the tumultuous terrain of the “white male psyche”.
When three fictional protagonists travel between England, South Africa and Australia, their projections onto these landscapes mirror colonial mindsets in the historicised past, the vexed present, and an imagined post-corporeal future.
An unsettling and beautiful piece, WYE tackles white guilt with demanding complexity. While, on one screen, we inhabit the intrinsically arrogant mindset of a 19th-century British settler on his arrival to the Eastern Cape, on another we follow a 21st-century South African man who walks a Port Elizabeth beach seeking a ‘blank canvas’ free of crime and ‘politics’ before emigrating to Australia. on the third screen we enter the white male body itself, which has become ‘colonised’ in the name of a futuristic form of psycho-anthropology.
According to curator and writer Nina Miall: “At the heart of WYE is an artist attempting to convey the evolving political nuances of his own position in relation to his subject, and [...] to ‘scratch at the surface’ of the vexed terrain of post-apartheid South Africa, to mine its [...] historical scars, contemporary anxieties and future disaffinities.”
The title WYE alludes to the 19th-century Romantic idealisation of the River Wye the spiritual home of the English picturesque at a time when European imperialists swept inland in Australia and Southern Africa. The title also invokes the ‘wye’ structure of the letter ‘Y’, which is used in engineering and railroad parlance (two of the building blocks of the British colonial project), and a shape that echoes the triangular narrative structure of the three interconnected films.
This exhibition marks WYE’s debut in South Africa, after it was commissioned and exhibited by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (Sydney) in 2016. WYE was produced by Laurence Hamburger (goodcop) and filmed by the legendary German cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein (Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre and Woyzeck).
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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.
