Goodman

Screenings

Mikhael

Subotzky

Goodman Screenings is a monthly digital programme presenting a curated selection of artist films, documentaries, and multimedia works available to stream exclusively on our website for a limited time. Each screening engages with timely cultural moments and dialogues with the gallery’s exhibitions and wider programming. By offering access within defined viewing windows, Goodman Screenings preserves the immediacy of live experience while opening it to a global audience, bringing powerful moving-image works from the gallery and beyond to viewers everywhere.

This Month’s Feature: Mikhael Subotzky, Moses and Griffiths (2012), WYE (2016) and Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent (2022)

Mikhael Subotzky
Moses and Griffiths, 2012

A filmic portrait in four parts, Moses and Griffiths recounts the stories of two men and two buildings. Both men, Moses Lamani and Griffiths Sokuyeka, are tour guides and custodians of historical sites in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), South Africa. These sites are the Observatory Museum, with its nineteenth-century camera obscura, and the 1820 Settlers Monument, built in the 1970s. Both appear twice, on two of the work’s four screens. They offer, in turn, the official tours that they were giving in 2011 when the artist first encountered them – with their rote histories and platitudes – and, at Subotzky’s invitation, more personal reflections on the place, its past, and their lives in it. The four-channel film moves between these modes, pairing the impersonal with the intimate. Moses and Griffiths, Subotzky suggests, “is a meditation on the relationship between institutional and personal memory, and the discord that occurs when they are brought together. It is also a detailed study of both the protagonists and the politics that is written into the architecture that their stories inhabit.”

This film screening includes a composite of the 4-channel film installation. Editions of Moses and Griffiths are in the MoMA, Guggenheim, Standard Bank and Tate collections.

Credits:
Mikhael Subotzky
Moses and Griffiths, 2012
Four-channel film
Edition of 5

Mikhael Subotzky
WYE, 2016

In WYE, an immersive three-screen film installation, Mikhael Subotzky treads the tumultuous terrain of the “white male psyche”. Here the artist tackles white guilt with demanding complexity.

Three fictional protagonists travel between England, South Africa and Australia. Their projections onto these landscapes mirror colonial mindsets in the historicised past, the vexed present, and an imagined post-corporeal future. On one screen, viewers witness the intrinsically arrogant mindset of a 19th-century British settler on his arrival to the Eastern Cape. On another, viewers follow a 21st-century South African man who walks a Port Elizabeth beach seeking a ‘blank canvas’ free of crime and ‘politics’ before emigrating to Australia. On the third screen viewers enter the white male body itself via a disembodied “psycho-anthropologist” of the future.

The title WYE alludes to the 19th-century Romantic idealisation of the River Wye, the spiritual home of the English picturesque at a time when European imperialists swept inland in Australia and Southern Africa. The title also invokes the ‘wye’ structure of the letter ‘Y’, which is used in engineering and railroad parlance (two of the building blocks of the British colonial project), and a shape that echoes the triangular narrative structure of the three interconnected films.

The work was commissioned and exhibited by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (Sydney) in 2016. The film being screened here is an installation documentation of WYE at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in 2016 that allows all three screens to be viewed together.

Credits:
Mikhael Subotzky
WYE, 2016
Three-channel video installation

Mikhael Subotzky
Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent, 2022

Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent’ is the third in a trilogy of films following Moses and Griffiths and WYE. The work was at the centre of Subotzky’s 2022 solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery London.

Divided into four chapters and underpinned by a libretto written by Subotzky in 2020 and a score by Jonathan M. Blair. Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent engages patriarchy’s shapeshifting ability to pass violence on from generation to generation. The film departs from the 17th century – a moment when the so called “Dutch Golden Age” and “Enlightenment” in Europe coagulate with the international slave trade, imperialist extraction, and the colonisation of South Africa. Subotzky is interested in how the art and literature at the time, through the 20th century and into the present moment, have both reflected and actively contributed to the colonial project. Interweaving the greater historical and political narrative of the film are two highly personal narratives that grapple with Subotzky’s relationship with his own father, and a man called Hermanus, an important collaborator in Subotzky’s work since 2005.

Credits:
Mikhael Subotzky
Epilogue: Disordered, and Flatulent, 2022
Single channel HD film
Edition of 5