Kaa-U-La Bird

Provenance

Acquired from the artist via Magnum Photos on 17 May 2018.

Literature

Laura Havlin (2017) Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress), Magnum Photos, online, accessed 19 August 2025.

Notes

The present lot is currently located in London.

Best known for landmark photographic projects such as Beaufort West and the award-winning Ponte City, Mikhael Subotzky has, over the past decade, extended his inquiry into how images
are made, circulated, and believed by translating photographic and archival sources into large painterly surfaces. His painting and collage practice sits within a broader, cross-media
investigation of the politics of images, in which he deliberately unsettles the truth-claims of documentary photography.¹

The present lot belongs to the body of work developed around Subotzky’s Cape Town project Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress), where he manipulated found imagery and his own photographs, re-staging them in paint to expose the gaps between what is presented and what is hidden. The canvases stark monochrome tonality, areas of erasure, and heightened, almost
theatrical poses exemplify the way the artist pulls apart and re-assembles images to probe memory, spectacle, and spectatorship.²

The composition in the present lot reworks a historical publicity photograph of Violet and Daisy Hilton, Brighton-born conjoined twins whose lives moved from early exploitation to vaudeville celebrity in the United States, and later to film. By recasting their likeness in paint and partially effacing the male interlocutor, Subotzky complicates the original image’s power dynamics: the twins appear luminous and self-contained, while the faceless figure stands in for the gaze that commodified them. The Hilton sisters’ biography, emancipated in 1931 after years under guardians’ control, celebrated on stage and in cinema, and remembered in medical and museum histories – underpins the work’s meditation on autonomy, doubleness and display.³

Monumental in scale the present lot encapsulates Subotzky’s ongoing dialogue between photography and painting, an approach that evolved in the wake of Ponte City, a project that earned him the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and that continues to animate his later exhibitions and interviews, where he describes materially ‘breaking apart’ images to examine how history is seen.

^1. (no date) Mikhael Subotzky: Artist Biography & Exhibitions, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery

^2. (2017) Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress), Magnum Photos, online, accessed 29 August 2025.

^3. J A Rooth (1911) “The Brighton United Twins,” British Medical Journal vol. 23, pages 653-654.