Installation and Photography:
Kyle Morland
Production:
János Cserháti and Chloé de Villiers
Artist:
Cameron Platter (‘Inferior Design’)
Interior Design offers three engagements with printed matter. The title riffs on artist Cameron Platter’s presentation in the lobby and central room of the gallery, ‘Inferior Design’. This installation of hanging mobiles, tapestries, and sculpture follows A4’s publication of My Work Here Is Done (2026), which details Platter’s collaboration with the weavers of the ELC Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in KwaZulu-Natal. ‘Inferior Design’ grew out of an ambition to turn that zine into a space – like a pop-up book. ‘Inferior Design’ is bordered on one side by ‘AGR’, a studio in which an annual general report is rendered as a high-gloss magazine. At the far end of the gallery, ‘Dressing’ revisits A4’s Sightlines project towards a publication on a collection of artworks. A sightline places works in conversational groupings using cards as stand-ins for those that are absent. Interior Design invites your read on interiority and composition (from ‘psychological decor’ to outward expressions) while playfully querying tensions between the categories of ‘fine art’ and ‘furnishings’.
Inferior Design:
Cameron Platter
Sightlines:
Dressing
The room draws on a strategy developed for the exhibition, Sightlines (opened 13 May 2025), that sees our team position artworks in small, conversational groupings. In preparation for that project, we printed a deck of cards, with each card representing a work. Multiple discrete objects, given this uniform ‘frame’, are played alongside one another. With everything pictured together, connections become visible across histories, geographies and materials. Sets of artworks constellate along an axis and come into focus. This is a ‘Sightline’ – a passage to thought that emerges across the chatter of like and unlike things brought together. Where we are unable to loan artworks, the cards act as their ‘stand-ins’.
AGR – Annual General Report
This working studio is set up to examine what will, in September 2027, be ten years of A4’s projects from the foundation’s curatorial studio in Buitenkant Street. This is in preparation to publish an ‘Annual General Report’ in the form of a magazine reflecting on A4’s workings and processes. The magazine-making studio is helmed by Josh Ginsburg working with Ben Johnson. ‘AGR’ draws in a changing array of objects and artworks resonant to the projects that will be featured in the magazine, contained in blue masking-tape squares for the studio’s duration.
Ben Johnson
Editor:
Sara de Beer
Writers:
Lucienne Bestall, Sara de Beer, and Chloé de Villiers
