RETINAL SHIFT

Mikhael Subotzky’s 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Exhibition is running at the Monument Gallery and Gallery in the Round in Grahamstown during this year’s National Arts Festival. The exhibition will centre on Subotzky’s first film, which has been produced specifically for the National Arts Festival and the exhibition tour.

Moses and Griffiths is a filmic portrait of two buildings and two men. Focusing on the tours that Moses and Griffiths give of the two buildings, the installation presents, on four screens, a complex interwoven narrative that explores the relationship between personal and institutional histories.

The rest of the exhibition at the Monument Gallery presents three further video works, and a large photographic installation. These works draw on archival portraits from the last century, found surveillance footage, and Subotzky’s own photographs from various series’ that are re-contextualized here. 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.

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.

Mikhael Subotzky will also be collaborating with Athi-Patra Ruga on a performance piece, entitled Performance Obscura. This piece will link the Standard Bank Young Artist exhibition, with Making Way, another visual arts exhibition on the Festival’s Main programme. It will consist of a unique performance that can only be viewed through Grahamstown’s Victorian camera obscura at the Observatory Museum – a panoptic device par excellence and 19th Century precursor to contemporary surveillance systems.

Retinal Shift is running in the Monument Gallery & Gallery In The Round at the 1820 Settler Monument, Lucas Avenue in Grahamstown until July 8. Open daily from 09h00 to 18h00.