Raplh Borland is showing at Machines Room in the UK until the 3rd September 2015.
Machines Room:
45 Vyner Street (Ground Floor)
London
E2 9DQ
Machines Room is excited to be hosting Ralph Borland’s project, African Robots.
African Robots is a project by South African artist and researcher Ralph Borland to create interactive electronic street art. ‘Street art’ in this instance means art sold by people on the street, in South Africa and Zimbabwe – usually forms of handicraft using inexpensive materials like fencing and electrical wire, beads and waste wood, plastic and metal. The project focuses particularly on wire work, where artists make three dimensional forms from wire, using a cheap material to create complex results. Basic electronic components can with the necessary know-how also be used as cheap material for creating interactive sculptures.
African Robots is a project that functions at many levels: as a social development project, sharing skills with street artists; as an art project, leading to new works; as a critical design study that imagines alternative futures through fictional artefacts; and as an exercise in friendship and skill-sharing to catalyse innovation. The project will be on exhibition at MachinesRoom, a British Council Maker Library space in London, from 13 August – 3 September 2015.
Ralph Borland is an artist, designer and curator, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His current research project is ‘Global Arenas’, an investigation of Southern contributions to global knowledge. He has curated exhibitions including SURFACE TENSION: THE FUTURE OF WATER at Science Gallery Dublin in 2011 and is working on ‘DIY – an exhibition of South African art, design and ingenuity’. He is part-owner of a cooperative brewery and bar in Cape Town.
African Robots is supported by the SA-UK Seasons programme, a partnership between the Department of Arts and Culture, South Africa, and the British Council. Additional support by Pro Helvetia’s Southern African Ant Funding programme
