Work towards sound-blindness began in the first quarter of 2020, when Circle Series tasked Katharien de Villiers with staging an exhibition in A4’s Reading Room; a place of learning and exchange.

“For the most part, these people are here for the free wifi,” was Katharien’s initial response to imagining the adjacent Library as a site alongside her work.

For the artist, the Library’s publics became imagined interlocutors in the early conception of the work she would bring into the environment – pieces that would come to extend three-dimensionally into the space, seeming to provide plastic chairs to sit upon, beds, trollies, the stuff of domestic spaces and street-level scenes. Waiting to be populated by the real-time users of the library, these protrusions into the space entrusted the ordinary with authority, evincing a romance with the mundane. The work pays close attention to what is hidden and taken for granted; the paintings layered and talkative.

In South Africa, during lockdown, only essential food and medical supplies were available for sale and purchase, necessitating a new look at materials and colours; a reassessment of previously overlooked tubes of paint. 

Curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, stalled and postponed again, sound-blindness opened a year from where it began. Instead of the intimacy of strangers locked into their devices, reading phones against the background of books, the artist met her visitors in intimate exchanges. One-on-one or in pairs, guests visited sound-blindness through two months of Thursdays, where Katharien sat at work. Personal moments of connection, as well as time spent in relative quiet and solitude, provide material for collage, through which the artist notated the process of sound-blindness, creating a zine from these encounters. In this way, she extended the exhibition beyond the works on the wall, as the works themselves escaped from frame.

An online seminar on April 21, 2020, with invited guests, artists, curators and practitioners, was an opportunity for Katharien to talk through her work, and for participants to probe and troubleshoot before beginning the exhibition phase.

Katharien was the first artist to participate in Circle Series. From sculpture to painting, and installation, sound-blindness revealed the “patina of time”, surreal symbolism, Afrikaans onomatopoeia, and collage constructed from hybrid memories.

“I remember the engineer’s table my father worked at, covered in koki and pencil lines, a layering of possible trajectories which accumulated over time.”

Once sound-blindness closed, the A4 team rolled the zines up, placed them inside of plumbing pipe sealed at the ends with blue tape and dropped off (by motorcycle-delivery) a copy to everyone who came to visit sound-blindness.

About Circle Series

Circle Series invited emerging artists to work with an emerging curator towards an exhibition in A4’s Reading Room. The location of the Reading Room (as a site of knowledge and learning, as well as exchange, and adjacent to the Library) was intended to play a role in the staging of the work. The A4 team supported the artists throughout this engagement and offered insight into working with an arts institution. The artists were paired with a writer from the team to create an exhibition text that considered the coordinates of their practice.