Mikhael Subotzky | Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape)
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.
The title for the show excerpts a historic architectural publication; ‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa: Plans and Pictures of Architect-Designed Houses’ 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.
Artworks
About
Mikhael Subotzky
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.
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