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 show marks a significant return to his hometown, a decade after first introducing Sticky-Tape Transfers in his 2014 exhibition ‘Show n’ Tell’. 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). Two large paintings — ‘Home Building Ideas for South Africa I and Home Building Ideas for South Africa II’ — draw from Wale’s title which, upon discovery, 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.