There is a car in the bookshop. That's the first thing. A 1976 Mercedes, cream, or I remember it as cream, parked between the café and the shelves of catalogues I’ve never seen anybody buy, doors open like it's waiting for someone to finish their coffee. And coming out of it, Cassper. Gusheshe.

A Gusheshe is a BMW.

I laughed. I don't think anyone else did. A woman next to me was reading the wall text with her glasses pushed up on her head and she didn't look up. Maybe it's only funny if you grew up with the 325iS as a religion, spinning in a parking lot in the township on a Sunday, the smell of the burning rubber. Maybe it isn't funny at all. A German car built here in 1976, the year of Soweto, the car of the apartheid economy and also the car your uncle wanted, playing a song about the other German car. I kept thinking: nobody chose this on purpose. Then I thought: of course somebody chose this on purpose. I still don't know.

This is what I mean when I say Johannesburg is a collage city. Nothing here gets to mean one thing. A BMW becomes a Zulu word. A pass office becomes a shelter. A gold reef becomes a skyline, and the skyline becomes a postcard, and the postcard ends up in a taxi rank sold next to phone chargers. We don't build on cleared ground. We build on top. Tape, borrowed parts, whatever holds. I've said this before, to friends, usually late. I'm saying it again because Subotzky's show made it true in a way I could touch.

Literally touch, almost. His Sticky-tape Transfers are made by lifting pigment off photographs with adhesive tape and putting the pieces back together somewhere else. Up close you can see the edges where the tape was, a little shine, a little lifting. The ten panels of the title work run in vertical strips: maps, mine shafts, the inside of Ponte, moonflowers on brick, jacaranda, jacaranda again. It reads like the view out of a car window when you're a passenger and not really looking. Which is most of how anyone sees this city. Driving from Sandton to town. His Cosmos View pair has both of them in it, Sandton and the CBD, far away, floating over a field of pink cosmos. Estranged twins, the press release says. I'd say they're more like exes who still share a WhatsApp group.

There's a thing Michel Serres says, I think in the long conversations he had with Bruno Latour, about time and a handkerchief. Iron a handkerchief flat and two points on it are far apart. Crumple it into your pocket and suddenly they touch. He thought time works more like the crumpled one. That's what the strips do. It's also what the city does. There's a photograph in the show, Panning (or Gugulethu Gold Rush), of a man alone in a huge landscape, panning for gold the way the first diggers did when they found the reef, a hundred and forty years ago. Same dish, same water, same bent back. Nobody ever ironed Johannesburg. It's been in somebody's pocket the whole time. The Mercedes is 1976 and 2026 at once. Cassper is in there too. I don't know if Serres would have liked the comparison. I think he might have liked the taxis.

Mikhael was there that day, which I hadn't planned for. We stood in the gallery and talked. About love, mostly, which I didn't expect, and about the car, and his studio at Arts on Main, and family. His studio manager came over and we met properly for the first time. At some point we worked out when we'd first met: Cape Town, years ago, when I was still working there and he was on a residency with Patrick Waterhouse. I had a whole memory of that and then when I tried to say it out loud it went thin. It was a good conversation. Warm. The kind that makes you feel the city is smaller than it is. Serres again, sorry. In French the same word, hôte, means both host and guest, and he built a whole book, The Parasite, out of that confusion. Standing by the car I couldn't have told you which of us was which. I told him I wanted to write about the show. We said I'd come to the studio, sit down, do it properly. Then it was FNB Art Joburg week and everybody disappeared into it, me included, and we never found the day. So this is the review without the interview. I never asked him about the work. Everything here I'm saying from the outside of it, which is maybe the right place to write a review from, or maybe it's just where I ended up.

I have always liked Mikhael's work for the risk. Physical risk, I mean, as well as the other kind. The prison photographs. Going up Ponte when the whole country had decided to be afraid of it. That nerve is still there in 80 Albert Street, eight panels of the facade of the building that held the worst pass office and then, much later, burned in 2023. Seventy-seven people. Many of them migrants, asylum seekers. He doesn't make it beautiful. Or he does, a bit, the light is good, and I still have no idea what to do with that. I stood there longer than I stood anywhere else. I'm not sure I looked at it properly. I was thinking about the fire.