Ponte City is a collaborative project between Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse focusing on a single 54-story building that dominates the Johannesburg skyline.
The building is cast as the central character in a myriad of interweaving narratives that, through photographs, commissioned texts, historical documents, and urban myths, chart the convoluted histories of both the building and Johannesburg itself. The Ponte City exhibition, which consists of a single installation of thousands of photographs and documents, has been exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, 2014), FoMU (Antwerp, 2014) and Le Bal (Paris, 2014). Excerpts from the series have been shown at the Liverpool (2012) and Lubumbashi (2013) biennales as well as the South African National Gallery (Cape Town, 2010). Ponte City won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.
Mikhael Subotzky’s works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical, and political narratives that surround him both at home in South Africa and on his travels. Executed in a variety of mediums – from photographs to film and video installations, and more recently collages and drawings – these works have been widely exhibited and collected.
