Strauss & co - 12 October 2015, Cape Town

194 475 Mikhael SUBOTZKY SOUTH AFRICAN 1 981- Playing with Plastic, Toekomsrus, Beaufort West edition 7/9 lightjet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper 48,5 by 59,5cm R30 000–40 000 EXHIBITED Museum of Modern Art, New York, Beaufort West , 2008 Studio La Citta, Verona, Beaufort West , 2007 Goodman Gallery Cape, Cape Town, Beaufort West , 2007 FOAM (Foto Museum Amsterdam), Amsterdam, Beaufort West , 2007 LITERATURE Mikhael Subotzky. (2008) Beaufort West , London: Chris Boot. Illustrated in colour on page 11 Jonny Steinberg in Mikhael Subotzky: Beaufort West, page 75: Almost every photograph carries a suggestion of theatre, and almost every theatre uses the desert as its stage. The boy on the rubbish heap who has donned the Spider-Man mask he found in the trash; the children launching the white sheet into the wind; the screaming man and the princess on their manicured horses; the white girl with the competition tag and high heels on the black-floored stage, posing for an audience off-camera; the snake and the elephant staring so very sweetly at the ill man on the bed; the prisoner lying beneath a massive mural of cacti and sand and stone, like a giant bubble representing the inside of his mind. In each photograph the subjects transport themselves elsewhere: where, precisely, we are not sure. 476 Guy TILLIM SOUTH AFRICAN 1 962- Leopold and Mobutu series 6: The statue of Henry Stanley which overlooked Kinshasa in colonial times. It rests on a steamboat that belonged to the African International Association, a company publicly charged by Leopold with a philanthropic and ‘civilising’ mission that veiled its true purpose of annexing and exploiting natural resources. The statue was removed during the Mobutu period of Africanisation in the 1970s and dumped in a government transport lot in Kinshasa. The boots belonging to the statue are found in another lot, September 2003 signed and numbered 2/5 in pencil in the margin archival pigment ink on 300g cotton paper diptych: paper size 61 by 158,5cm R30 000–40 000 EXHIBITIONS : Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu , 12 May to 19 June 2004 OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria, Biennale Cuvée , 2008 LITERATURE Adam Hochschild. (2004) Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu , Bégard, France: Filigranes Éditions, unpaginated. 477 Guy TILLIM SOUTH AFRICAN 1 962- Leopold and Mobutu series 31: Left: A UN helicopter lands at Bunyatenge bringing a Mai Mai official to help negotiate the demobilisation of remnants of the Hutu army, alleged committers of genocide in Rwanda, and their families who have taken refuge in the forests of the eastern DRC, January 2003; Centre: The model of a Force Publique soldier in a display case at the Military Museum in Brussels, January 2004; Right: Training camp for Mai Mai soldiers, Beni, eastern DRC, December 2002 signed and numbered 1/5 in pencil in the margin archival ink on 300g cotton paper triptych: 51 by 189cm R30 000–40 000 EXHIBITIONS Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu , 12 May to 19 June 2004 LITERATURE Adam Hochschild. (2004) Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu , Bégard, France: Filigranes Éditions, unpaginated. Guy Tillim spent July to September 2003 photographing traces of the colonial occupation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium and vestiges of more recent plunder under Mobutu Sese Seko. Tillim’s images, frequently composed in diptychs and triptychs, juxtapose historical sites in the Congo and Belgium with contemporary views of the DRC. Adam Hochschild, author of the highly acclaimed King Leopold’s Ghost , writes: ‘Rare is the photographer whose work so well captures not only the country before his camera’s lens, but also the country of a hundred or more years ago.’