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 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.

The exhibition's centrepiece is a unique reimagining of a famous watercolour painting by Scottish travel writer, artist, and wife of the first British Colonial Secretary at the Cape, Lady Anne Barnard. Her image depicts a panoramic view of Cape Town, painted from the roof of her residence at the centre of the Castle of Good Hope. Subotzky’s 9.5 metre-long installation, ‘A Cape Town Landscape’ (2024), uses his Sticky-Tape Transfers technique to combine a photographic panorama taken from the exact same spot on the Castle’s roof with Barnard’s original. This process weaves a complex visual narrative, (re)capturing Barnard’s gaze some two centuries later while revealing the interplay between colonial fantasies and photographic realism. 

‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or A Cape Town Landscape)’ confronts the unique topography of shared and competing histories that are embedded in representations of the landscape and structures of Cape Town. Subotzky’s distinctly unstable images allow for details to arise that are at times unintended or uncontrolled by the artist. Leaning into the dysfunctional representational mechanics of painting, photography and film, Subotzky reveals the burden of narrative and memory that is placed on fragmented unstable images.