Pixel Interface II

Mikhael Subotzky
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1981.
He lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Mikhael Subotzky is a self-described image maker who finds visual and representational expression through photography, video, and film. Subotzky’s interest in photography was sparked when he decided to document his travels while backpacking across South Africa in 2000. His work, which draws from a very personal space, is reflective of the Foucaultian biopolitics of violence as an implicit form of power and control. As he puts it, “I still very much see my work as being about myself, and my place. It is photographs of my personal experience of my surroundings.” He has variously addressed incarceration in the South African context, a subject steeped in the country’s difficult colonial and apartheid histories. In 2004, when he was a final-year art student at the Michelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, he created his breakout Polsmoor series, an intense examination of the lives of inmates at a correctional facility in Cape Town. The work struck a powerful chord and heralded his swift rise to widespread acclaim in the art world.
Subotzky’s artistic process has been described as total immersion in which he spends time in close proximity with his subjects. In his Beauforth series, which he began in 2007, Subotzky examines the living conditions in Beauforth, a small town that is located between Johannesburg and Cape Town. He focuses his attention on those living on the margins of society, such as inmates in the town’s jail, prostitutes, pimps, and the poor. Some of the images from the series are emotionally laden and disturbing to look at. They point to the dark and challenging aspects of human experience, and attest to Subotzky’s ability to earn the trust of his human subjects.
For the Biennale di Venezia, Subotzky presents Pixel Interface, a three-part digital video projection in which he creates an abstract field of colors consisting of red, green, and blue from violent film and television images. A stainedglass effect is the result of amplifying and merging single lines of pixels from three separate video plinths, distorting the visual integrity of the images as seen through high-definition projectors. By his interest in the unseen complicity of the image maker, Subotzky draws on his personal experience and his connections to the collective as he examines the structural, psychological, and representational violence that is conveyed in television and film.