Mikhael Subotzky with Patrick Waterhouse / Recent Works / 2010
In early 2008, Mikhael Subotzky moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg, and since his move has been at work on two long-term projects. While independent, the projects are both influenced by Subotzky’s engagement with the city of Johannesburg. They are presented as works-in-progress, eventually to be realised as full exhibitions and publications.
The first body of work continues a long-held interest in crime, social marginalisation, and the public and private institutions of punishment and security. This investigation started in 2004 with Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners) and continued in subsequent years with Umjiegwana (The Outside) and Beaufort West. In this exhibition, Subotzky presents works that extend the three series into new environments. Loosely focusing on the lifestyle of fear in South Africa, the images explore the vexed and many-layered concept of security in contemporary society.
The second project, begun in 2008, is a collaboration with British artist Patrick Waterhouse – whom Subotzky met while on a residency in Italy. The work is located in Berea’s Ponte City building, an iconic structure in Johannesburg’s skyline that has long been a symbol for the city itself. Opened in 1976, Ponte has come to represent the best and the worst of Johannesburg, and has generated a particular mythology of city life.
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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