19 October 2026 · Reported from verified organiser, artist and editorial sources linked below.
The city is not a single picture
Mikhael Subotzky’s “A Johannesburg Landscape (or Thirteen Tons Settled to Brick)” is on view at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until 31 October 2026. Its premise is more demanding than a photographic tour of familiar landmarks. The exhibition treats the city as a structure assembled from overlapping memories, materials, maps and contradictions — something that can be cut apart and put back together without becoming whole.
The show brings together painting, photographs and Subotzky’s distinctive Sticky-tape Transfers, a process of lifting pigment from photographic surfaces with adhesive tape and rebuilding it in layered compositions. The method gives physical form to a question that documentary images often conceal: what has been selected, cropped or left outside the frame?
Why a Mercedes is parked inside the story
Before entering the main exhibition, visitors encounter a South African-built 1976 Mercedes in the gallery’s bookshop and café. Goodman Gallery links the vehicle to Subotzky’s developing film project, “24-Hour Joburg”, for which the car becomes a moving site for conversation and filming.
The year is not incidental. In South Africa, 1976 is inseparable from the Soweto uprising; the vehicle can carry associations of industry, status and unequal access at once. That does not make the car a tidy metaphor. It makes it an object with several competing histories, much like the city around it.
An inheritance measured in thirteen tons
One strand of the exhibition follows a family account of Subotzky’s German-Jewish great-grandfather, who, unable to take money out of Nazi Germany, converted assets into a thirteen-ton steamroller, shipped it to Cape Town and sold it to help establish a life in South Africa. The gallery describes the story as central to the artist’s reflection on displacement, property and identity.
It is a striking account because the same object changes meaning with each border crossed: capital becomes machinery; machinery becomes the means of settling; a family history becomes part of a city’s material history. The work asks viewers to consider how personal arrival stories sit within larger, unequal structures.
What the collage refuses to resolve
In the exhibition’s ten-panel namesake transfer, fragments of mining, mapping, architecture and plant life interrupt one another. The gallery describes views of Sandton and the central business district, traces of Ponte City and Johannesburg’s jacarandas and bougainvillea. These details resist a single story of progress or decline.
The exhibition opened on 27 August and runs through 31 October 2026. This is a reported interpretation grounded in Goodman Gallery’s exhibition text, not a claim that CREATIVE KONG has inspected the installation in person. What it offers is a reason to look at Johannesburg as a contested archive rather than a finished image.
