MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY ARCHIVE

“The source footage for this work is from central Johannesburg and was acquired from the police. Their CCTV programme is highly successful in terms of arrests and crime statistics, and yet central Johannesburg is still seen as a no-go zone by many. The footage was given to me by the police in short clips and is unedited. My only intervention was to place them in 12 boxes on a single screen, and to time them in relation to one another to emphasize a point: that moment when the arrested criminals are forced to look back into the scopic eye that has helped to apprehend them.”