Website

A4’s online environment offers a record of past processes, a repository of ideas, archives and artworks, and tools for research and wandering. It is a place to find things and a place to get lost; a platform for structured engagements and incidental encounters. The site’s contents and mechanisms make visible curatorial practice, revealing the often unseen corners of exhibition-making and -thinking. Different modes of moving through the database afford opportunities to create novel intimacies between disparate entries.

Search
The Search function allows the user to seek out information across the entire website. This is what’s commonly referred to as ‘global search’ (though this shouldn’t be confused with a search engine like Google that indexes everything on the internet). Using Search, you’ll find matches to your queries from both our Database (see next slide) and the content produced specifically on the website environment itself, like the Reader, and Paths. The Search function is accessible anywhere on the site by clicking the Search button (resembling a magnifying glass) on the top right-hand corner of the page.
Database
The Database holds hundreds of records: A4’s projects, resources and special collections, uploaded and managed by our team. These can be filtered by Practitioners, Projects, Tags (keywords), Date and Type (category). You are welcome to play with the filters, applying them to see what you can find, but the database is an essential tool if you already know what you are looking for. Our team embed Database records directly into Paths, Project, and Reader pages, and create tags and set specific filter criteria (artworks from a specific show for example). Embedded Database Modules evidence themselves with a bi-directional arrow in the title of the module. When clicked on, one enters the full database pre-filtered (but now adaptable) to the source project.
Explore
Reader
The Reader hosts sustained, written engagements on given subjects in the form of interview transcripts, essays, and short stories, among others. Most are illustrated, and most link back to respective projects with which they correspond. Some are commissioned from external practitioners, while others are taken from the wayfinders we publish to accompany our exhibitions. The Reader is a space to spend dedicated time on longform texts; a place to return to.
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Paths
Paths offer curated engagements with our database. Made by invited practitioners and A4’s team, each path follows a given line of enquiry through hundreds of discrete entries – images, library books, harvest quotes, special collection items, and others. Paths might focus on an exhibition, a theme, a question, or a formal device. They might feature accompanying text or choose a purely visual expression. Drawing from diverse data across the site, Paths experiment with the generative potential of pulling unlike entries into relation. They offer insight into how research finds form, and how this might be articulated in different registers. Paths is a place to follow thought.
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Dream States
Dream States offer non-linear image-based engagements with our database. Certain images contain ‘states’ (indicated by a yellow dot that appears when your cursor moves). Clicking on a state takes you to another image. Sometimes these states follow an evident logic – for example, an installation view moves to an artwork image which then moves to a detail of the work. In others, the relationship is more oblique – one abstract painting might speak to another across exhibitions, a blue composition might suggest a complementary chromatic work. Dream States offer alternative, wandering ways to engage our image archive; a way to get lost.
Find your way
The A4 team

Find your way through A4's website.

Path page
Find your way
The A4 team
Find your way through A4’s website.
Path page

Explore current and past processes



Arranged together under the heading ‘What we do’ are three processes central to A4’s programming: exhibitions, residencies, and research. Each associated page houses records for current and past projects, descriptions of the associated spaces in the building, and explanations of select programming components, such as Accelerator and Course of Enquiry. These categories offer straightforward engagement with our online content; a place to begin.

A series of modules on each project page draws together various entries from the database related to the process. For example: each exhibition page features a framing text, installation photographs, a map, a digital wayfinder, the works included, and related projects. Additional modules might express further readings, special collections, cabinet items, or harvest entries. These modules suggest different modes of engaging our content and alternative ways of moving through the database.

Browse longform text in the Reader

Follow a Path through the site

Search the Database

Get lost in Dream States

Harvest entries



Harvest is a strategy and inventory of research fragments subjectively selected by the team that consists of passing thoughts, impressions and anecdotes gleaned from conversation and correspondence. As an idiosyncratic exercise, Harvest does not aspire to create an exhaustive or ‘complete’ archive but rather to encourage the subjective curiosity of the 'harvester', enabling the collection of compelling ideas from disparate sources. Compiled under this logic, unexpected interconnections and juxtapositions between seemingly unlike or unrelated things can surface. Entries are characterised by maker, sharer, tags, and source (conversation, correspondence, presentation, or publication). An accompanying text offers a brief framing of the entry’s provenance.

The entries accumulated during Harvest sessions can become prompts for future conversations in a call-and-response between past and present engagements; tracing common threads between conversations as new voices expand on previous insights.

Extending Harvest’s application, Harvest Live describes the simultaneous act of collecting sentences, thoughts and wanderings during engagements with practitioners. These find expression not only in Harvest’s online archive, but as discrete offerings, such as zines and index cards. The entries accumulated during Harvest Live sessions more often become prompts for proceeding conversations in a call-and-response between past and present engagements; tracing common threads between conversations as new voices expand on previous insights.

Cabinet



Cabinet describes the physical housing of objects adjacent to processes within A4’s building, and the means by which they are consigned. An artist’s pen, fragments, off-cuts, a note scribbled on paper; all such species of things find an archival home in the foundation’s Cabinet. Like Harvest, Cabinet is more incidental than comprehensive, and offers a collection of objects with particular resonance to each maker’s engagement with A4. For the time being, Cabinet has no single location – being a distributed archive across the building’s three floors. More legible examples of the exercise can be found on the About Wall on the ground floor, or in the online database.

Wayfinders



Produced for exhibitions at A4, the wayfinder is a print publication comprising variable modes of engagement – indexes, images, maps, conversations, prompts, and reflections. It is a tool for orientating viewers within an exhibition; a strategy for making curatorial process visible; an articulation of physical space in different registers; and an invitation for sustained reflection on discrete artworks and the resonances their proximities propose. Printed and bound in-house, our wayfinders are freely distributed to visitors. All the wayfinders are available to read on our website, and each discrete exhibition features a wayfinder module for easy reference.

The Database hosts a number of resources like Artworks, Publications, Harvest Items, and Special Collections. A4 does not have a collection of artworks, but we collect the stories and traces of artworks that have been shown at A4 together with artworks we are custodians of while they spend time at A4. Special collections include parts of the archives belonging to artists and organisations that have been digitised by A4 (with permission) so that they can be shared with the public.

The content on the website is A4's content, or content shared by collaborators and practitioners who we are lucky enough to work alongside. If you'd like to make use of any of the content on this site please follow the terms and conditions of the license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.

This website was developed and designed by our friends at Linked by Air. It is built in the CMS Economy and integrates with A4's information management system in Airtable.

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