'Retinal Shift'
Mikhael Subotzky at Iziko South African National GalleryMikhael Subotzky's Standard Bank Young Artist 2012 exhibition 'Retinal Shift' investigates the practice and mechanics of looking – in relation to the history of Grahamstown, the history of photographic devices, and Subotzky’s own history as an artist. The works in the show draw on archival portraits from the last century, found surveillance footage, and Subotzky’s own photographs from various series’ that are re-contextualised.
The opening work on the show is a self-portrait that Subotzky made with the assistance of an optometrist. High-resolution images of his left and right retinas are placed side by side. “I was fascinated by this encounter. At the moment that my retinas, my essential organs of seeing, were photographed, I was blinded by the apparatus that made the images. So it is a self-portrait of myself, the photographer, at a moment that I could not see.”
'Retinal Shift' extends this motif of looking while not seeing – exploring it through Grahamstown’s history, our contemporary surveillance society, and the artist’s personal attempts to see.
Subotzky’s photographic work combines the directness of the social documentary mode with a questioning of the nature of the photographic medium itself. He is concerned with the structures of narrative and representation, as well as the relationship between social storytelling and the formal poetics of image making.
28 November - 09 January
