Books for A4’s Library are acquired in different ways; some are purchased new, others sourced second-hand, still more are gifted by visiting practitioners. There are also those rare books that arrive quietly – slipped onto the shelf, one imagines, by aspirant authors and artists.

The second-hand books carry with them an occasional archive comprising improvised bookmarks and more deliberate inclusions – an article on an artist folded into their monograph, for instance, or a handwritten synopsis of a play in The Works of William Shakespeare.

Such ephemera become dispatches from the recent past, recalling something of the books' previous readers and of the setting in which they were first read. Together, they trace a history of individual lives – paths travelled, time taken, attention given – and, more obliquely, a history of South Africa.

A social history of the country is recounted in a miscellany of matter, from a late-1970s advert for home insurance (R15.00 a month) to a less-than-enthusiastic review of local pop music, including Kurt Darren’s 2007 album, Lekker Lekker, found in the Library's copy of David Goldblatt's Some Afrikaners Revisited (2007).

Others trace the country's political past. Oftentimes, however, the more curious story is told on the reverse of the newspaper clippings. In one such instance, dated February 20, 1988, a line anticipates the end of the white-minority rule and with it the administration of so-called homelands:

Nevertheless, there has been a retreat from Verwoerdian apartheid, which has left the TBVC states [Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei] exposed as anachronisms of a dying era.

Hendrik Verwoerd is again recalled in an order form for a book published on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the South African Republic in 1966. The form was found in the Library's Sixty-Six Transvaal Trees, a botanical survey with a nationalist bent, published the same year to coincide with the Republic Festival.

Another order form – filled out but never sent – for a then-forthcoming book on Gerard Sekoto lists the details of one OAA Bock. A brief online search suggests Bock published in several medical journals in the 1970s. His speciality was gastric ulceration. Perhaps, an A4 team member speculates, he wanted the book for his waiting room.

Other art-related finds include a newspaper clipping about the refurbishment of the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1986, which cites oversights in the collection but is wholly impressed with its architecture:

The building ranks with major galleries and museums of the world, and that's a very nice thing for Transvaalers and all South Africans to feel pleased about.

An artwork label from an exhibition with a handwritten note ("Teruggestuur Warren Siebrits") indicates that the untitled work is to be returned to the collector. The label was found in a catalogue made to accompany Cyprian Mpho Shilakoe's posthumous retrospective, marking the page where the same work is featured.

And a photocopied document (the original written on a typewriter by Johanna de Villiers in 1997) offers a summary of Jean Welz's life and work. The document was slipped between the pages of Esmé Berman's seminal Art and Artists of South Africa (1970).

But perhaps the most prized Library finds are those from The Works of William Shakespeare, a treasure trove of handwritten notes and newspaper clippings. The now-worn book once belonged to an Eva Pargiter and is inscribed ‘Xmas 1948’.

Among the loose sheets of paper kept between the book’s pages are summaries copied from John Wain’s The Living World of Shakespeare, a playgoer’s guide (1964) and FC Halliday's texts on the playwright, as well as a meticulous list detailing the many times Eva read and reread each play.

An online search suggests the following: Eva Pargiter was born in 1901, retired at St James Hotel in Kalk Bay, and is likely buried alongside her husband in the Maitland Cemetery.


The collected ephemera found in The Works of William Shakespeare are available to view here.

By way of ending, a final offering: a photograph given without inscription – two lilies, cement detailing, green.

Begin with bare equivalences –

Four works: all monotone, all cleaved by a line.

First impulse –

A landscape by David Goldblatt divided, as the genre demands, by the horizon into complementary halves.

(Being unframed, the photograph cannot be included. It remains present as a note tacked to the wall, beyond the limits of the blue tape.)

First artwork –

Almost landscape, almost portrait. A photograph halved by eclipsing white. The chromatic composition of Sabelo Mlangeni’s image echoes Goldblatt’s, yet the line, rather than describing the topology of a given place, serves only to obscure it.

Similarly obscured –

The material nature of Kyle Morland’s work, first mistaken as a photograph by Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, as an indexical image of a worn surface.

Another impulse –

To include such a photograph; to follow the error.

(Also unframed, this photograph joins Goldblatt’s on the far side of the blue tape.)

In truth –

Morland's work is a rubbing made of the unseen facets of a steel sculpture; a notation of what is otherwise invisible. The seam that runs across the darkness describes the intersections of different planes.

Then –

Another unseen space, twice divided by shadows. This, too, by Goldblatt. Like Hlatshwayo's photograph, emphasis is given to the texture of time as it is transcribed on surfaces. The chromatic composition inverts that of the landscape, further resisting easy simile with its two dividing lines.

Lastly –

A fabric assemblage by Gerda Scheepers recalls Mlangeni’s image in composition and concealment.

In the lower half of the work, which appears all incidental mark-making and abstraction, is an impression of a landscape arranged vertically.

The title of the work, Pondoland Pocket, ties the image to a place, inviting comparison with Goldblatt’s photograph of the Karoo.

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.

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.

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 –

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.