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Dada South? Archive | Workshop
Research 8–12 July 2024
Process: Dada South? Archive | Workshop, July 8–July 12, 2024. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title Dada South? Archive | Workshop Dates 8–12 July 2024 Location Reading Room Credits

Dada South?
Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance

December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010
Iziko South African National Gallery

Curators:
Kathryn Smith
Roger van Wyk

Assistant Curator:
Lerato Bereng

“The hours that hold the figure and the form
Have run their course within the house of dream.”
– Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1928)

A week-long intensive in the Reading Room sees curators Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk unpack an archive of material accumulated during the research and design of Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance at Iziko South African National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. This historic exhibition hosted Dada artworks from international collections in Berlin, Paris and Zürich, alongside an extensive selection of works by local artists from the 1960s to 2010. Reviewing the exhibition’s archive after a 14-year interval asked for a conscientious attention to detail, openness to errantry and frank discussions about the values practitioners bring to the table in reconstructing the context and felt quality of the subject matter.

Situating this particular exhibition within broader enquiries into experimental arts practices by the curators and others (see selected bibliography below), it becomes evident that Dada is (to rephrase Benjamin) pivotal to understanding the role of the arts in broader philosophical critiques of modernity and its unequal and asymmetric distribution in colonial expansion and totalitarian regimes. What emerged during this workshop was a need to be particularly sensitive to how Dada’s double-edged strategy of enchantment and disenchantment relate to, reconfigure and/or amplify similar narratives in modernity as a whole.

In our attempts to wrestle life-affirming strategies like freedom of thought from the complex heritage of art locally and elsewhere, we need perhaps hold Dada’s twin legacies of utopianism and cynicism more lightly. Indeed, the Dadaists seemed always to be anticipating their own end, even as they reached for alternative ways of being and becoming.

A4's Reading Room is an adaptable space attached to A4's Library and Archive. Intended to solve for form depending on its required function, it as at once a book-ish environment for reading and contemplation and a place to unpack artists' archives. The Reading Room's inter-leading doors become walls when locked to create a stand-alone spacial research studio that hosts residents and practices site-specific work that most-often is connected to packing and unpacking projects as a form of research.

Artists from the exhibition

Jane Alexander, Siemon Allen, Hans Arp, AS IS, Kevin Atkinson, Avant Car Guard, Johannes Baader, Bridget Baker, Wayne Barker, Walter Battiss, Deborah Bell, Willie Bester, Belinda Blignaut, Erwin Blumenfeld, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Willem Boshoff, Candice Breitz, Susan Bristow, Brendon Bussy, Norman Catherine, Kathy Coates, Christo Coetzee, Jacques Coetzer, Steven Cohen, Barend de Wet, Aletta du Toit, Neville Dubow, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Edwards, Carl Einstein, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, flatinternational, Kendell Geers, Josh Ginsburg, Neil Goedhals, George Grosz, Gugulective, Stacy Hardy, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Emmy Hennings, Matthew Hindley, Nicholas Hlobo, Stephen Hobbs, Hannah Höch, Robert Hodgins, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Wopko Jensma, William Kentridge, Lisbeth Kkwadi, Yves Klein, Greta Knutson-Tzara, Adrian P Kohler, KOOS, Donna Kukama, Andrew Lamprecht, Moshekwa Langa, Andre Laubscher, Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, Michael MacGarry, Ashnath Makubila, Sanna Mokgaha, Brett Murray, John Nankin, François Naudé, Gimberg Nerf, Christian Nerf, Dimitri Nikolas-Fanourakis, Eduardo Paolozzi, Cate Paputla, David Paton, Malcolm Payne, Francis Picabia, Peet Pienaar, Possession Arts, Chris Pretorius, Andrew Putter, Jo Ractliffe, Lesego Rampolokeng, Man Ray, Julia Raynham, Robin Rhode, Hans Richter, Julia Rosa Clark, Tracey Rose, Athi-Patra Ruga, Ruth Sacks, Rudolf Schlichter, Joachim Schönfeldt, Kurt Schwitters, Lucas Seage, Rosemarie Shakinovsky, Robert Sloon, Warrick Sony, Nathaniel Stern, Paul Stopforth, Rolf Streuber, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Johan Thom, George Tobias, Tristan Tzara, Chaz Unwin, Hentie van der Merwe, Theo van Doesburg, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Ian Waldeck, Wolf Weinek, Robert Weinek, Emmett Williams, Ed Young, Asha Zero.
Ephemera: Hats constructed during Kathy Coates’ Iziko Educational Programme workshop with volunteers from Young Ambassadors and others. Subsequently worn by performers during the opening of Dada South? Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Selected Bibliography

Smith, K. (2005) ‘An accidental situationist, or, what happened when Battiss thought out loud’, in Skawran, K. (ed.) Walter Battiss, Gentle Anarchist. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, pp.59–67. Available here.
Smith, K. (ed.) (2007) One Million and Forty-Four Years (and Sixty Three Days): A Sampler. Stellenbosch: SMAC Gallery. Available here.
Smith, K. (2011) ‘The Experimental Turn in the Visual Arts’, in Goniwe, T., Mojavu, M. & Pissarra, M. (eds.) Visual Century: South African Art In Context 1990–2007, Vol. 4. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp.119–151. Available here.
Smith, K. & Van Wyk, R. (2016) ‘Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance: The anatomy of an exhibition in South Africa’, in Burmeister, R., Oberhofer, M. & Francini, E. (eds.) DADA AFRICA: Dialogue with the Other. Zurich: Scheidegger & Spies, pp.198–205. Available here.
Toussaint, D. (2017) ‘Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance: Dada’s Legacies from South African Perspectives’, in de arte, 52(2–3), pp.53–76. Available here.
Van Wyk, R. (2011) ‘The (Non)sense of Humour: Art, subversion and the quest for freedoms’, in Pissara, M. (ed.) Visual Century: South African Art In Context 1973–1992, Vol. 3. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp.156–179.
Van Wyk, R. (2023) ‘Dada’s African South’, in Hegenbart, S. & Kölmel, M. (eds.) Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, pp.125–142.
Spatialising ideas
Lucienne Bestall

A series of projects, workshops, events and residencies at A4 invite practitioners to play out enquiries in our Curatorial Studio, making artistic processes and research visible. – April 9, 2025

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Spatialising ideas
Lucienne Bestall
A series of projects, workshops, events and residencies at A4 invite practitioners to play out enquiries in our Curatorial Studio, making artistic processes and research visible. – April 9, 2025
Path page

How can thinking – with its complexities and subtleties, its false starts and revisions – be drawn out of the mind and into space? That artists more often think by doing offers a privileged view into creative practice, affording insights into their conceptual and material wanderings. This view, however, is largely limited to the studio or otherwise kept out of sight.

Inviting artists to inhabit our Curatorial Studio, working in view of the team, critical friends, and the public, A4 supports and promotes the spatialising of ideas. This drawing out of otherwise unseen processes, while taking its cue from studio practice, extends beyond artists to include invited practitioners engaged in art-adjacent or image-centred research projects.

At times, the ideas made visible at A4 are distilled into discrete presentations; at others, this spatialising is an end in itself, shifting into clarity the more opaque mechanisms of artmaking and -thinking.

Sean O'Toole's Course of Enquiry is a useful example of the former: a research project towards Photo Book! Photo-Book! Photobook! in A4's Gallery, which saw him trace a history of publications across a hand-drawn timeline, the cover of each book photocopied and taped to the wall. This initial chronological strategy was later refined in the exhibition.

Installation photograph from the Photo Book! Photo-Book! Photobook! exhibition in A4’s Gallery. On the left, four screen prints from Gavin Jantjes’ ‘Colour These Blacks White (A South African Colouring Book)’ series is mounted on the wall in an area dedicated to photobooks from the years 1945 to 1967.

An adjacent example is Moshekwa Langa | How to Make a Book, an iterative project that drew together both an archive of the artist’s work (exhibited in a sequence of four hangs) and a community of critical friends that contributed to an oral history of his practice.

Examples of the latter include engagements that restage the artist's studio in our Gallery. Projects that follow this format include two iterations of Parallel Play, where practitioners worked alongside one another, Kevin Beasley's without a clear discernible image, an exhibition made on site by the artist, and Igshaan Adams' Open Production, a hybrid studio environment.

Installation photograph from the 2018 rendition of ‘Parallel Play’ in A4’s Gallery. On the left, Moshekwa Langa’s gouache and pencil work ‘I Am So Sorry (Green)’ is mounted on the gallery wall. On the right, Kyle Morland’s sculptural objects is mounted on a moveable gallery wall.
Process photograph from the second rendition of the ‘Parallel Play’ studio setup in A4’s Gallery. At the front, a stack of Kyle Morland’s metal sculptures on a table. At the back, Asemahle Ntlonti and their studio assistant working on the gallery floor.
Process photograph from the ‘without a clear discernible image’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery. At the front, Kevin Beasley measures out a liquid component used for the resin hardening process on an electronic scale. At the back, sheets of brown paper with writing are taped to the wall.
Process photograph from ‘Open Production’, Igshaan Adams’ hybrid studio/exhibition in A4’s Gallery. At the back, three of Adam’s studio assistants are weaving with threads suspended on looms attached to the top of the gallery walls. At the back of the threads tracings made onto tracing paper are used as guides. On the lefthand side, one of the assistants is seated on metal scaffolding.

Other practitioners use the space afforded by our Curatorial Studio to unpack archives. These include the records and traces related to a given artwork or a past exhibition, as with Christian Nerf's Polite Force or the DadaSouth? workshop.

Such unpackings might ask after inherited collections, like those of the Dendrological Society of South Africa (of which Michael Tymbios became the unintended custodian) and the acquisition of art world-related ephemera by A4’s Library –

Installation photograph of Michael Tymbios’ studio during his residency in A4 Arts Foundation. A closeup view of a freestanding display case that holds photographs and ephemera.

Or offer artists the opportunity to reevaluate past and ongoing projects in the round, as with Tommaso Fiscaletti’s Hemel Liggaam and Patrick Waterhouse’s Standard Deviation, both of which played out in the Reading Room.

Space can become an unexpected tool in imagining and planning towards a publication, shifting the bound book object and its proposed contents into an expanded view, as with Larry Hamburger's Black Plastic project, also in the Reading Room.

Even those books already published lend themselves to be extended outwards. For the launch of Kim Gurney's Panya Routes, the author's research images were reimagined as objects, cut-out and propped up on a series of shelves as a backdrop to her conversation with Neo Muyanga.

Installation photograph from the book launch of Kim Gurney’s ‘Panya Routes’ in A4’s Reading Room. A white bookshelf mounted on the wall is lined with photographs from the book.

For the launch of ArtThrob: 25 Years of Art Writing in South Africa and Ernest Cole’s reissued House of Bondage, literal projections streamed live from a top-down camera not only magnified the books' contents but offered a physical engagement with the printed form.

Event photograph from the book launch of 'ArtThrob: 25 Years of Art Writing in South Africa' in A4 Arts Foundation. On the right, writer Keely Shinners is seated at the speaker's table. On the left, a livestream top-down view of the speaker's table is projected onto the wall.

Research more often consigned to digital folders takes on a new texture when it spreads out into space. Being visible, it invites generative discussions and offers 'proof of work', notating time spent ideating and problem-solving. It suggests the breadth and width of a given study and offers an image to an otherwise invisible process.

Take, for example, Lemeeze Davids' research on notebooks in Goods, the form of which – print-outs and handwritten observations – echoed its subject. Coinciding with History on One Leg, a browsable exhibition of Kentridge's studio notebooks, the presence of this research served as a useful primer (or footnote) to visitors.

Similarly, Social – an open-call archive of posters, physical and digital flyers, installation photographs, exhibition texts, and zines made in support of artist initiatives in Cape Town – found a visual expression in Goods. Wheatpasted to the wall, facsimiles of this ephemera traced a recent history and social cartography of the local art scene.

That research towards an exhibition can be experienced spatially allows curators to preempt and solve for form, much like Sean O'Toole's rehearsals towards Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook!. Other examples include Nkhensani Mkhari's presentation of mode(l) in Goods, which anticipated Model in the Reading Room.

Installation photograph from the ‘Model’ exhibition in A4’s Reading Room. In the middle, Bogosi Sekhukhuni’s ‘Dark Gravity,’ consists of a black trampoline with a black bowling ball resting on it. Various works line the walls, with two video screens mounted on a pole towards the back.

Not all exhibition-related projects aspire to a final presentation but instead persist as prototypes. Such was Mitchell Gilbert Messina's residency in the Reading Room titled Things That Move, which explored the potentials (and potential limitations) of exhibiting kinetic art at scale.

Installation photograph from Mitchell Gilbert Messina's residency in A4 Art Foundation. In the middle, two tables wrapped in brown paper holds pieces of cardboard and various electronic tools and components. At the back, the walls lined with pieces of cardboard that host pinned research notes.

At A4, the spatialising of ideas follows different registers and modes. Some of these projects are ambitiously complex; others are refined to the simplest of gestures. Still more exist between these two poles in their demands on time, space and attention.

The most sprawling of these is Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse's Ponte City book towers, a durational, episodic project that has since 2023 necessitated the unpacking and repacking of their archive, material tests, iterations of form, and the development of strategies of towards future educational engagements.

The most pared-back might be George Mahashe's Camera Obscura #3, which recast the interior of A4's then-unrenovated building into a projection screen, the brick-and-mortar structure performing as photographic apparatus and mind's eye.

Installation photograph from George Mahashe’s ‘Camera Obscura #3’ exhibition on A4’s top floor. The darkened space features freestanding surfaces with a projected images from A4’s exterior facilitated by Mahashe’s pinhole camera.

Tactile thinking, working in view of others, physically moving between coordinates, lending research dimensional form – these are among the many opportunities afforded by spatialising of ideas. But perhaps, most importantly, they make otherwise obscure processes visible, offering audiences insight into the provisionality, experimentation and productive uncertainty essential to creative practice.

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