LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive

Artwork date: 2006
Signature details: accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist
Edition: number 3 from an edition of 9

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image size: 105.5 x 128.5 cm, sheet size: 126 x 147.5 cm

Notes:

Mikhael Subotzky is a Johannesburg-based artist whose works in multiple mediums (including film installation, video, photography, collage and painting) attempt to engage critically with the instability of images and the politics of representation. Subotzky has exhibited in a number of important international exhibitions including, most recently, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican in London (2020); Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa at the University of California’s Fowler Museum in Los Angeles (2019); and Ex Africa in various venues in Brazil (2017–18). His award-winning Ponte City project (co-authored with Patrick Waterhouse) was presented at Art Basel Unlimited in 2018. The full exhibition and archive of this project has since been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will be the subject of a monographic exhibition there in the fall of 2020. Subotzky’s work is collected widely by international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town. His work was included in the Lubumbashi (2013) and Liverpool (2012) biennials. Pixel Interface, a multicomponent video installation, was included in All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). This work is from Subotzky's series Beaufort West (2006–2008). Inspired by the tradition of photographic portraits of small towns in South Africa, and in particular by David Goldblatt’s In Boksburg series (1982), the artist decided to do a portrait of a small South African rural town, looking at the issues of incarceration and social marginalisation. Subotzky was interested in how it told a powerful social story by exploring one particular place largely ignored by the outside world. This is a view of what are called ‘RDP houses’ in South Africa, a reference to the Reconstruction and Development Programme intended to provide cheap homes and create jobs. The houses are known for being small and depressing, each just a concrete box with a tin roof. But bleak as they were, people would move in and within a couple of months make real homes of them – painting, erecting fences, planting gardens, and setting up spaza shops and shebeens and pool halls in corrugated iron lean-tos. This suburb of Beaufort West is called Toekomsrus, which is Afrikaans for ‘future rest’. When the artist went around with the police, they'd often end up there because it was where a lot of Beaufort West’s crime took place. This work was published in the monograph Beaufort West (Chris Boot, 2008).Other editions of this work have been exhibited at FOAM, Amsterdam (2007); Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2007); the Moscow PhotoBiennale, Moscow (2012); and Parc de la Villette, Paris (2013).