Christian Nerf
Demonstrating a Drawing with Jared Ginsburg is counted among Christian Nerf’s many ‘exercises’: a series of instructions for automatic drawing strategies to be performed and reproduced by the artist and others. In this work, a ‘non-collaboration’ with fellow Atlantic House artist Jared Ginsburg, the pair walk up and down a flight of stairs, each pressing a stick of graphite to the wall to draw near-continuous lines. They begin at opposite ends of the staircase to meet somewhere in the middle, bumping up against one another. Rather than negotiate the soft obstacles of each other’s bodies and continue on their way, the pair doubles back in opposite directions, only to reprise “this brushing-up-against again and again and again, meeting at different points depending on our paces,” as Nerf says. “Towards and away repeat, all the while dragging graphite bars along the stairwell wall and leaving traces of our interaction smeared up and down the space.”
Demonstrating a Drawing with Jared Ginsburg was first staged at the AVA’s 40-year retrospective, A Natural Selection: 1991–2011, curated by Clare Butcher, as an unannounced performance. It has since been applied to A4’s wall twice: in 2019, during Nerf’s residency, and six years later in 2025 to coincide with the exhibition Sightlines. Shortly before the artists took up their graphite for the most recent installation, an A4 team member asked the pair if they were suitably ready to make some marks, perhaps imagining that one might need to limber up for such an activity. To this, Nerf replied that moving through the day and not making marks, intended or otherwise, is surely an impossibility (for him in particular and humans more generally).
b.1970, Johannesburg
A reluctance to category has defined much of Christian Nerf’s practice, as too has a dedication to rule-based experimentation. He is simultaneously a maker of structures and instructions and resistant to established constraints and institutional bureaucracies. This tension – between self-generated and socially expected boundaries – has come to characterise a seeming miscellany of actions, objects, and traces. “What threads, what bookends, what rules have been at work: what accommodates the freedom to play?” He asked in a process project, Archive as Terrarium | Part 3, at A4 Arts Foundation in 2019. “It’s easy to forget that to ‘play by one’s own rules’, one has to first go to the effort to grasp those rules that are already in play.” Collaboration (with people, plants and chance) has long offered Nerf a working logic, where artmaking is reconsidered as a learning exercise in pursuit of 'uncalled-for-newness'. Now in his ‘post-collaborative’ mode, he remains, as ever, hard to pin down – though his studio is no longer itinerant as it once was; the artist now a longstanding resident at Atlantic House. Automated drawings have since become central to his strategy of making, their mechanisms making them endlessly reproducible and shareable.
