A4 Arts

artist residency & studio practice

Cape Town

2018-21

Christian Nerf’s practice is often participatory and playful, investigating material, emotional, historical, and cultural properties. His residency followed the traces of his own archive of objects, quite literally spilling them into the A4 Arts space. Through installation, walkabouts, and activations, he rediscovered their stories and recontextualized
their meaning.

A4 Arts Foundation was established as a laboratory for the arts in 2017. The organization supports arts practitioners and provides an interface for the public to engage with the process of artistic and curatorial production.

The artist residency is a dynamic offering for local and international artists, ranging from one-day experimentations to three-month studio practices. Open studios often evolve into exhibitions, publications, or talks.

The engagement with the studio as a space for inquiry, practice, and exploration—alongside the artistic process, moments of research, production, doubt, and exchange—was managed on an individual basis. Detours and experimentation were encouraged, while key moments were identified to invite others into the process, enrich the conversation, and pose questions about things in the making.

Offering a generous and open residency program, I served as the conduit between the institution and the artists, shaping and translating ideas into meaningful engagements for our communities.

Artists I have hosted and collaborated with as the residency manager:

Christian Nerf (South Africa)
Bonolo Kavula (South Africa)
Gian Maria Tosatti (Italy)
Sabelo Mlangeni & Jabulani Dlamini (South Africa)
Kieron Jina (South Africa / Germany)
Sukuma Mkhize (South Africa)
Bubblegum Club (South Africa)
Ofri Cnaani (Isreal/UK), Stella Geppert (Germany), Evann Siebens (Canada)

Bonolo Kavula, now an acclaimed multimedia artist, comes from a background in performance, illustration, and printmaking. She used her time at the residency to develop a series of social commentaries. We presented her work to the public through prints and performance.

The performance artist Kieron Jina, who is based between South Africa and Germany, continues to investigate the psychology of public spaces, representation, and the gaze. He explores how the body is performed and which reactions it provokes. During his residency, we opened his studio practice to the public, creating encounters where the boundaries between stage and spectator, performer and protagonist, remained deliberately undefined.

Astronomer and artist Sukuma Mkhize explored ways to make the invisible natural world visible. By inviting other artists and thinkers to public studio talks, we opened the space to questions and ideas, which were further rendered through participation and a publication.

Measures of Closeness: a Lexicon of Gestures. How do we keep in touch in a contactless space in an age of hyper-communication? Can we survive but without touch, without skin? And what are the new measures of closeness? A long-distance performative session that emerged from ongoing research about gesture, space, connectivity, and technology. In the 1.5-hour Zoom meeting, while each one of us is in our own room, we will engage collectively in a series of movement exercises, choreographic figures, conversations, and chat rooms to provoke contemplation as to how we experience our bodies in relation to contact and confinement.

Gian Maria Tosatti engages with immersive installations by creating narrative-driven physical spaces. Although his residency was not focused on production, his research led to an exhibition in which he engaged with the institution’s collection, as well as the creation of an installation in an empty house we found—an approach he has consistently used throughout his practice.

The two photographers, Sabelo Mlangeni and Jabulani Dlamini, have been instrumental in shaping contemporary photography in South Africa. Their research delves into the long legacy of street and studio photography as a continuous archive of life and community, as well as studio portraiture as a celebration of identity and visual culture.

The collective Bubblegum Club became our first remote residents due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. We created a sounding board and interventions that could be managed digitally while still having physical effects. The collective explored the visual cues of Johannesburg’s urban landscape and the movement of the body in response to these stimuli. Additionally, we engaged in discussions about the collective’s identity as individual artists and how to structure a legal entity around it.