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Mikhael Subotzky | Epilogue

09 June - 09 July 2022
Goodman Gallery, London

Goodman Gallery presents Epilogue – Mikhael Subotzky’s first solo exhibition in London. Epilogue continues the artist’s critical engagement with the instability of images and the politics of representation.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new film, titled Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent (2022), which is the third in a trilogy of films following Moses and Griffiths (2007) and WYE (2012). Accompanying it are a series of paintings and sticky-tape transfers that were products of the film’s animation process, before evolving on their own terms.

Divided into four chapters and underpinned by a libretto written by Subotzky in 2020 and a score by Jonathan M. Blair, Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent engages patriarchy’s shapeshifting ability to pass violence on from generation to generation. The film departs from the 17th century – a moment when the so called “Dutch Golden Age” and “Enlightenment” in Europe coagulate with the international slave trade, imperialist extraction, and the colonisation of South Africa. Subotzky is interested in how the art and literature at the time, through the 20th century and into the present moment, have both reflected and actively contributed to the colonial project. Interweaving the greater historical and political narrative of the film are two highly personal narratives that grapple with Subotzky’s relationship with his own father, and a man called Hermanus.

Artworks

Work: 91.5 x 246.7 cm
Unavailable
Acylic, pigment pencil and ink on canvas
Work: 137 x 101.5 cm
Acylic, pigment pencil and ink on canvas
Work: 137 x 101.5 cm
Acylic, pigment pencil and ink on canvas
Work: 137 x 101.5 cm
Acylic, pigment pencil and ink on canvas
Work: 137 x 101.5 cm
Acylic, pigment pencil and ink on canvas
Work: 137 x 101.5 cm
Ink, India ink, pigment pencil, acrylic, oil and Gampi paper, collage on canvas
Work: 150 x 101.5 cm
Ink, pencil and acrylic on canvas
Work: 101.5 x 134 cm
Acrylic, India ink and ink on canvas
Work: 101 x 137.5 cm
Ink and pigment pencil on canvas
Image: 82.5 x 101.5 cm
Acylic, ink, pigment pencil, India ink and oil on canvas
Image: 101.5 x 134 cm
Acrylic, ink and pigment pencil on canvas
Image: 101.5 x 142 cm
Ink and watercolour on cotton rag paper
Image: 36 x 44.87 cm
Ink and watercolour on cotton rag paper
Image: 36 x 44.87 cm
Ink and watercolour on cotton rag paper
Work: 36 x 44.7 cm
Ink and watercolour on cotton rag paper
Work: 36 x 44.87 cm
Ink and watercolour on cotton rag paper
Image: 36 x 44.7 cm

About

Mikhael Subotzky image

Mikhael Subotzky

Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is a Johannesburg based artist whose film, video and photographic works are concerned with the structures of narrative and representation, as well as the relationship between social storytelling and the formal contingencies of image making.

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. Beaufort West (Chris Boot, 2008) was Subotzky’s first monograph and the series was included in the exhibition New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2008).

The exhibition Retinal Shift was produced by Subotzky on the occasion of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2012 and toured South Africa’s major museums. Retinal Shift includes two large photographic and video installations that critically engage with the artist’s own ambivalence towards the processes of representation and image construction. Retinal Shift (Steidl, 2012) was published to accompany the exhibition.

Retinal Shift also includes Subotzky’s first major film installation, Moses and Griffiths 2012, which uses four screens to narrate the contrasting and conflicting institutional and personal histories of two seventy-year-old tour guides in the small South African town of Grahamstown. Moses and Griffiths has subsequently been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013) Yale Art Gallery (New Haven, 2014) and Art Unlimited (Basel, 2014).

A third monograph, Ponte City (Steidl, 2014) is the product of a six-year collaboration with the British artist Patrick Waterhouse. This project focuses 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 exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, 2014), FoMU (Antwerp, 2014) and Le Bal (Paris, 2014). Excerpts from the series have been shown at the Liverpool (2012) and Lubumbashi (2013) Biennales, as well as the South African National Gallery (Cape Town, 2010). Ponte City has won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

Show ‘n Tell was initiated while on residency at the Musée MAC/VAL (Paris, 2013). This body of work looks to the relationship between images, the various instruments of their construction, and both the politics and physiology of their reception. Pixel Interface, a multi-component video installation from this body of work was included in All The World’s Futures, the main exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at the 56th Venice Biennale. WYE, Subotzky’s first fictional film installation, was commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (Sydney) and premiered there in March 2016. Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress), his first exhibition of paintings and performance, took place at Maitland Institute in September 2017.

Subotzky’s work is collected widely by international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington), Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the South African National Gallery, among others.

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