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Igshaan Adams | Open Production
Residency 18 August–12 November 2020
Process photograph from ‘Open Production’, Igshaan Adams’ hybrid studio/exhibition in A4’s Gallery. On the right, a wooden bench with woven basket and scissors. On the left, a mixed media tapestry in the process of being woven is mounted on the wall.
Process: Igshaan Adams’ Open Production, August 18, 2020–November 12, 2020. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title Igshaan Adams | Open Production Dates 18 August–12 November 2020 Location Gallery Tagline Igshaan Adams’ four-month residency titled Open Production transforms A4’s Gallery into a hybrid studio/exhibition environment. Credits

Artist's studio team:
Phumeza Mgwenteni
Busisa Mahlahla
Zandile Ntleko
Nocawe Jamani
Morné Roux

An enormous loom stands against one wall (the largest Igshaan Adams has yet to work on, utilising ceiling height and width of the gallery space), accompanied by the sound of beads being poured into buckets (the artist likens this process to the mixing of paint), as the strings of the loom vibrate with a music of their own.

Igshaan Adams is in the process of transforming A4's Gallery into a hybrid studio environment in which publics can interact with the process of the artist's production.

Intricate pieces adorn the walls in an arrangement of beaded verse, skeins of thread and cloth. Worn linoleum and scuffed cement salvaged from homes in Bonteheuwel and the surrounding neighbourhoods are transcribed from floor to wall through the painterly application of beads, woven into tapestries that shift the perspective on substances found underfoot. The artist calls these floor remnants 'documents': the personal maps that are, through wear and presence, inscribed upon domestic environments.

To the sculptural installations suspended from the ceiling, Adams has given the working title Kicking Dust. He moves about the studio space imparting into these wire and beaded clouds pieces treasured from previous works, as he speaks of the way dust clouds constellate, the earth dislodging and accumulating form.

"It may stay this way, or come down and become something else, completely," Adams says of the working environment, which is adapting as pieces grow and interact with visitors, neighbours, and the team on the ground. Publics are invited to share in the intimacy of the works; the patience and joy entailed in their making.

Event photograph from ‘Knots’, a conversation between Igshaan Adams and Josh Ginsburg, marking the close of ‘Open Production’, Adams’ hybrid studio/exhibition in A4’s Gallery. At the back, Adams shares a video with attendees.
Event: Knots, a conversation with Igshaan Adams, November 12, 2020. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
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
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.

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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