'Tell It to the Mountains' in is an exhibition featuring Mikhael Subotzky and Lindokuhle Sobekwa.
The exhibition’s title reimagines that of James Baldwin’s 1953 novel – Go Tell It on the Mountain – and the African-American spiritual of the same name. “Go back to where you started,” Baldwin writes, “or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it.”
Throughout Sobekwa’s residency at A4, he reassembled his photographic practice out of sequence and time, building a horizon line onto the foundation’s walls. The hub of the exhibition is a large tree. Titled Mthimkhulu II, this autobiographical installation by Lindokuhle references the ilhathi lesiXhosa, those remaining thickets of forest that are sacred to the amaXhosa and can be found in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Extending the thematics this tree proposes, Mikhael Subotzky’s four-channel video installation Moses and Griffiths (2012) offers a filmic portrait of Moses Lamani and Griffiths Sokuyeka that asks after the distance between ‘home’ in Tantyi, a township outside Makhanda (then known as Grahamstown), and ‘work’ in the city’s colonial structures.
