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Sightlines
Exhibition 31 May–8 November 2025
Installation view: Sightlines, May 31–November 8, 2025. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title Sightlines Dates 31 May–8 November 2025 Location Gallery

The exhibition, Sightlines, sees our team position artworks in small, conversational groupings. When not installed at A4, these reside in our archive – a research environment for curators, arts workers, and practitioners who may wish to revisit past work. Sightlines shares viewpoints from this archive with visitors. What stories might these artworks tell while standing together?

In preparation for this project, we printed a deck of cards, with each card representing a work. Multiple discrete objects, given this uniform ‘frame’, could be played alongside one another. With everything pictured at once, connections became visible, uninhibited by geographical distance or pre-conceived hierarchies. This is a 'Sightline' – a passage to thought that emerges across the chatter of like and unlike things in the room. Sets of artworks constellate along an axis and come into focus. Our approach has been to edit and refine curious lines of sight, installing select artworks in the gallery with cards remaining as stand-ins for others.

Sightline A:
History will break your heart

A phrase borrowed from the title of Kemang Wa Lehulere’s 2015 exhibition, which debuted at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda. Two of Wa Lehulere’s works, Does this mirror have a memory 2 (2015) and Cosmic Interluded Orbit (2016), are included in Sightlines.

Sightline B:
In its place

Within these walls
Lucienne Bestall

Taking as prompt 'In its place', a thematic position included in the exhibition Sightlines, artworks from A4's database are drawn into view.

Path page
Within these walls
Lucienne Bestall
Taking as prompt ‘In its place’, a thematic position included in the exhibition Sightlines, artworks from A4’s database are drawn into view.
Path page

Artworks that speak to the particularities of a given place are brought into proximity in A4's Gallery. They recall, in summary and across mediums, an old convent, left abandoned and later reclaimed; a municipal art gallery, underfunded; an apartheid-era 'oriental plaza', earmarked for demolition; a rural homestead; a high-rise apartment; a caregiver’s home; a corporation’s headquarters.

Common among them is a shared attention to surface, to abrasions or their absence, to signs of wear and repair, to anything purposeful or incidental that might reveal something of the lives and values that inhabit (or once inhabited) the spaces they describe.

Of the seven works included, three appear abstract, each a study of texture that stands as a metonym of a discrete building.

Installation photograph from The Future is Behind Us exhibition in A4’s Gallery. In the middle, Gian Maria Tosatti’s plaster on canvas work ‘5\_I fondamenti della luce - archeologia (intonaco 7)’ is mounted on a white wall.
Installation photograph from The Future is Behind Us exhibition in A4’s Gallery. In the middle, Asemahle Ntlonti’s mixed media painting ‘Emaphandleni’ is mounted on a white wall.

A fourth work, a video piece, offers a differently textured engagement with space, pairing images of a building's neglect, seen slantwise, with its sonically resonant emptiness. While not an abstract artwork in the formal sense, it remains abstracted, its subject revealed only obliquely – in prayer.

Two others are photographic, documents of a more descriptive kind: one an interior, the other an exterior. While the first hums with life and warmth, the second appears forbidding, its facade stone cold and impenetrable.

The last is a figurative drawing that transcribes not only the architectural features of the setting but also its muted ambience. Suggestions of parquet flooring, of accumulated dust, of bureaucratic failings (bare shelves, effaced artworks, empty plinths) are conveyed with a spareness of detail that is no less evocative for its brevity.

From the very strata of plaster and paint lifted from a wall and applied to canvas, to the intricately embellished translation of worn vinyl into woven composition, each of these works assumes a different distance from its subject, picturing places or excerpting their material features. Where some pursue a visual veracity, others offer a more tactile or lyrical engagement with place.

Regardless, the respective spaces referenced exist; the works gathered here are of and from the world. Still more examples are present as index cards; others are implied but nowhere accounted for in the Gallery.

Installation photograph from the ‘Customs’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery. Dor Guez’s vinyl work ‘Double Stitch’ features vinyl line drawings that stretch across the gallery floor and wall.

Further works offer themselves to be included in this Sightline. In one, the floorboards from a decommissioned school's gymnasium are reassembled as a minimalist composition. Seen in this new context, the eye is drawn to the patina of wear that marks the boards, those rubber-sole marks and scratches that recall an otherwise unrecounted social history.

(This work, having educational resonances, is included as an index card in another Sightline in A4's Gallery, 'No ordinary school'. It stands as a conceptual hinge between the two groupings).

Similarly attentive to texture, a photograph from our online database offers an indexical record, not only as an image but as a substrate onto which a given setting has rubbed. Place is simultaneously pictured (however obscurely) and differently recorded in the accrual of tears, burns, and other 'woundings' that intercede on the image surface.

Still more photographs draw close. A series recalls a site of defiance and dispossession; a standalone image pictures the sitting room of an uncle's home. Both embody a sense of their settings as witnesses to the lives that inhabit them –

Installation photograph of the Common exhibition. Sue Williamson’s ‘The Last Supper at Manley Villa’, a rectangular grid of framed prints hung on a pink wall. Ten are black and white photographs, on the bottom right corner is one colour photograph and towards the bottom left is one eviction notice.

a sense explicitly conveyed in those photographs of peopled scenes, and the literal writing on the wall that attests to their presence, but no less felt in that of the empty room, where a family photo attests to the individuals to whom the house is home.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Kwa Malume Mxolisi' shows a curtain covering a window and bunched at the top of a cushioned sofa.

Other figurative works might also be included, two of which are offered here. Where the first pictures South Africa's parliament, seen ablaze in the background –

the second is more quietly commonplace, recalling features of a Johannesburg childhood home (skirting and plug points) and other ordinary effects (pot plant and standing lamp). In an aspirational, if fanciful, flourish, a self-portrait of Picasso, partially cropped from view, is included too.

Compiled in this path are a few examples among many others – some more apparent additions, others only tenuously connected to the Sightline, but no less compelling for their thematic opacity. Explore these and further artworks on our database or view the selection of Sightlines included in the exhibition.

Sightline C:
No ordinary school

Sightline D:
Equal in Paris

The title of this Sightline is taken from James Baldwin’s 1955 essay of the same name, in which the writer recounts how, the year following his arrival in Paris in 1948, he was arrested on suspicion of stealing a bedsheet. “And it must have seemed to me that my flight from home was the cruelest trick I had ever played on myself, since it had led me here, down to a lower point than any I could ever in my life have imagined – lower, far, than anything I had seen in that Harlem which I had so hated and so loved, the escape from which had soon become the greatest direction of my life.”

Installation view: Sightlines, May 31–November 8, 2025. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Installation view: Sightlines, May 31–November 8, 2025. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
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