{icon-p}
Start
{icon-rundum}
Artworks
{icon-kalender}
Calendar
{icon-mehr}
More
DE
Language

Mikhael Subotzky

Moses and Griffiths, 2012

Information

Location Gallery 1
Artist

© Mikhael Subotzky

 *1981, Cape Town, South Africa

lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa
Title

Moses and Griffiths, 2012
Medium Four-channel-film with sound, 18:51 min.
Copyright

© Mikhael Subotzky

Installation view PalaisPopulaire 2023, Photo: Mathias Schormann
Exhibition number AW201

Audio guide

In his photographs, and more recently in his films, collages and paintings, Mikhael Subotzky critically engages with the instability of images and the politics of representation.

In his first film installation Moses and Griffiths, from 2012, Subotzky draws on his experiences in Grahamstown,now known as Makhanda, a town in South Africa containing many memorials to the Cape Frontier Wars between 1779 and 1879, Southern Africa’s most protracted series of struggles by indigenous peoples against European colonizers. Projected across four screens, the work is a portrait of Griffiths Sokuyeka and Moses Lamani, two Black seventy-year-old tour guides who respectively worked at the 1820 Settlers National Monument, built to honor the contribution of British colonists to South African society and the Observatory Museum, which showcases the history of the South African diamond industry and includes a 19th century camera obscura.

When Subotzky first heard the guides' official tours, he was surprised at how uncritically they presented the town’s history. Everything revolved around the English settlers. The history of apartheid was completely ignored. So he asked Lamani and Sokuyeka to give him another tour, and this time, to tell him about their own experiences. Their personal accounts, full of pain and grief, provide a powerful contrast with the official version of history they've been obliged to learn by heart and recite to the visitors.

Mikhael Subotzky's installation shows the two guides’ official and personal tours simultaneously on four screens, carefully edited and synchronised, revealing the instability and malleability of memory.

Further artworks from this exhibition