A4 Arts Foundation
06.05 - 26.07.2023
Common, the new group show up at A4 Arts Foundation, covers well trodden territory: the ground upon which people come together. Allow me to stick with this terrestrial metaphor for a sec, because the exhibition’s curator, Khanya Mashabela, is especially interested in finding the right environment for community to form. She is less concerned with the type of community that is formed and more so with the infrastructure that makes any kind of collectivity possible. Her formalist approach to the topic is a useful one, I think. Being in common with others is difficult, but necessary. We need to build collective forms, because form makes relation possible.
Common has a fourfold structure. The first half of the show focuses on two key common grounds: the family and the archive. The last two sections consider how community is structured by communication and boundaries respectively. It is definitely one of the more shapely exhibitions I have seen at the gallery of late. A4 identifies as a “laboratory,” which means that their shows tend to feel quite loose and probationary. They always manage to squeeze water out of the conceptual stone, but Common is a uniquely full-bodied presentation. The ideas are not only developed but deeply felt. I ended up hanging out there much longer than expected, listening to Idris Ackamoor on Mitchell Messina’s jukebox and reading about the Medu Art Ensemble from the selection of books on display.
The influence of Medu’s graphics can also be seen in the incredible selection of t-shirts that make up the centrepiece of the show. The pieces, sourced from the South African History Archive and the GALA Queer Archive, are hung across the middle section of the space as if on a washing line and feature an array of designs that belong so unmistakably to late-era Apartheid resistance movements. I felt bad for thinking about how cute some of them would look on me — God forbid I aestheticise the struggle — but Mashabela wants to show how something as apparently superficial as fashion can be a meaningful political form. Fashion is an embodied medium that marks its wearer in ways that can be politically consequential. Wearing one of these t-shirts in the 80s not only put you in danger, but it also positioned you within a greater community of resistance.
I switched up my usual route through the exhibition space this time around, turning left where I usually go right. I scanned the Pemba and Sekoto scenes briefly, the latter more hushed than the former, but both capture the suspended immediacy of a collective moment quite effectively. Guy Simpson’s 1:1 fridge painting is a triumph and feels like the exhibition’s most emblematic piece. Mashabela admits to working with the idea of a communal fridge as a scale model of sorts for the show, and Simpson’s cosy realism gives very literal shape to that idea. The fridge, like the washing line, should be appreciated as a minor commons. A small communal space that keeps us in relation to one another.
Despite his heady conceptual ambitions, Nolan Oswald Dennis’ contribution serves a rather practical aesthetic purpose. His dangling pillar of globes, model for an endless column, feels like an important architectural feature without which the show would lose its shape. I could not figure out what it meant, but it looked great. In Painting/Retorque, Francis Alÿs performs a similar function in a very different context. Set in the former Panama Canal Zone, the documentary video shows the artist repainting traffic lines along a country road. True to his ethic of “maximum effort, minimal result,” Alÿs diligently emboldens a collective structure that guides the flow of people and cargo. Both Dennis and Alÿs are doing covert architectural work in brilliant primary colours.
I found the Boundaries section especially interesting, because it seemed to go against the grain of the exhibition. Lerato Shadi and Gregory Olympio, in particular, complicate Mashabela’s thesis by demonstrating that the formation of a group most often depends on an exclusion. Olympio’s Paysage Grillage 10 depicts the wire mesh of a gate, gesturing towards the complicated etymology of the word community. Communitas originally referred to a military formation, a collective (com) fortification (munire) protecting the ingroup against the other. Shadi, for her part, uses language as a strategic barrier. Mabogo Dinku deploys Edouard Glissant’s oft-appropriated notion of opacity to speak exclusively to, and thus constitute, the set of Setswana speakers. Any theory of community worth its salt needs to take seriously the problem of exclusion and Boundaries manages to bring this problem to the fore.
The other end of the floor, to the right of the hang out section, is less exciting, but still worth a visit. You will find two works by Hanna Noor Mahomed, neither of which really grabbed me, though the scale of her mural felt generous and inviting. The narrative progression was fun to follow along the wall as well. An immersive mural experience. I find Fabian Saptouw’s nerdy conceptualism to be endearing for the most part, but his visualisation of ISBN and ISSN data from South African universities turned out to be a bit of a nothingburger. The exhibition text specifies that it is supposed to be unremarkable, so there’s that. Community building is not always glamorous.
In the lobby area, on my way out, I had another look at the Sabelo Mlangeni and Sue Williamson photographs. Most of Mlangeni’s are up inside, but I especially liked the wedding ceremony scene at the entrance. The bottom third of the image is blotted out by a light leak that swallows the crowd in a milky tide. Williamson’s The Last Supper at Manley Villa depicts a different kind of encroachment: the last Eid of the Ebrahim family before they were forcibly removed from District Six. The series feels delicately poised between familial intimacy and politics at large. Williamson’s ability to think collectivity at multiple scales is true to Mashabela’s vision for the show as a whole.
What I am left with is yet another A4 wayfinder to add to my stash, albums from the shelf of The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, fodder for conversation, t-shirts to dote on with the gallery staff, new recommendations to pass around, books to find, ideas to parse. In short, a set of convivial tools, per Manolo Callahan, that can facilitate relation in the face of a deteriorating public sphere. Common conjures up an atmosphere of conviviality and bonhomie. It is the kind of show you should take a friend who is in town for a couple of days to see. I can guarantee that you will both walk out with a renewed openness.