Mikhael Subotzky: It has been a big shift, but it has been a gradual one. Each of my first three major works – Die Vier Hoeke and Umjiegwana, Beaufort West, and Ponte City – gradually developed my understanding of both the mechanics of making ‘documentary’ images and my own internal relationship to the work. Retinal Shift then became the body of work where I really pulled everything apart and rearticulated my relationship to image making. After that, writing a fictional script felt like a logical evolution.
DAMN: How is WYE also a reflection and analysis of your own gaze as photographer and white male in this previous work?
MS: I think Retinal Shift was more a reflection on what you mention. As I say, WYE came from that both formally and intellectually. WYE is really my attempt to figure out my own relationship, as a white male, to the tides of historical narrative, and particularly in relation to the colonial gaze and the colonial subject’s bodily relationship to the landscape.
DAMN: How do all of these paradoxes – divisibility, space, time, narration, projection and desire – play out in the work?
MS: Basically, I believe that all of our narrative understandings of space, time and politics (human relationships) are based on fundamental paradoxes – the stories we tell ourselves to try and comprehend the confusing vastness of lived experience. Sprinkling this notion down into the specifics of colonialism, whiteness, film-making, anthropology, masculinity, romanticism, England, Australia and South Africa, and so on, is the aim of the work.
DAMN: What is the significance of water in the work? With the current drought in South Africa and the North Dakota Standing Rock protests, it seems to have a historical biopolitical resonance?
MS: Its circumstantial to those current events, but very important in that colonialism would look completely different if it weren’t for the waters that both separate continents but also allowed the travel between them before we learnt to fly.
DAMN: After the Goodman Gallery show in Johannesburg until April 2, where and what next?
MS: I’m looking forward to taking WYE to Cape Town in September, and then hopefully at some point to London to complete the England-South Africa-Australia triangle. Apart from that, I’m really just looking forward to more time in the studio.
Sticky-tape Transfer 13, Quiver Tree / Robert Jacob Gordon, 2014 (triptych), 125cm x 95cm, 125cm x 99.5cm, 125cm x 100cm, Pigment inks, J-Lar tape and Micropore dressing tape on cotton paper
MS: I think Retinal Shift was more a reflection on what you mention. As I say, WYE came from that both formally and intellectually. WYE is really my attempt to figure out my own relationship, as a white male, to the tides of historical narrative, and particularly in relation to the colonial gaze and the colonial subject’s bodily relationship to the landscape.
WYE, 2016, 3 channel film installation
