Exhibition
without a clear discernible image: Kevin Beasley
February 6 – April 30, 2020

A solo exhibition by Kevin Beasley, produced on site at A4.

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Kevin Beasley is artist-in-residence at A4 through January 2020, visiting from his home in Harlem, New York City. Together with studio assistant Shani Strand, Beasley converts A4's gallery into a studio, for the production of his solo show, without a clear discernible image. This is Beasley's first exhibition on the continent.

Kevin Beasley was born in 1985 in Lynchburg, Virginia. He earned his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit in 2007, and his MFA from Yale University in 2012. Beasley creates immersive environments, incorporating found objects into sculptures, installations, and assemblages. Personal items and cultural artefacts may be activated by live performance, and sound often becomes a tactile presence in the works.

Event

Ernest Mancoba Symposium: A dialogue on his art and words

February 11, 2020

This symposium brings experts from Denmark, the USA, France and South Africa together to talk about the work and life of Ernest Mancoba, in recognition of the critical evaluation which his contribution to the canon demands.

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Curating the first retrospective of Ernest Mancoba's work in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in June 2019, Alicia Knock writes, "Ernest Mancoba is an unclassifiable artist, as witnessed by the scope of his historical career, his transnational trajectory through societies that were repressive or not very open to a black man having an autonomous career and a visual language half-way between figuration and abstraction..."

Born in 1904 in Johannesburg, Mancoba earned his BA from the University of Fort Hare. He left South Africa in 1938 for Paris, where he studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs. He married the Danish artist Sonja Ferlov in 1942, while interned in a labour camp in St Denis. In 1947 Ernest and Sonja moved to Denmark, where they became members of the CoBrA group of abstract artists. Mancoba died in 2002, in France.

Exhibition

Measuring the Universe: Roman Ondák
A collaboration with the Rennie Collection, Vancouver

February 14 – 16, 2020

A4 invites visitors to participate in a performance artwork by Roman Ondák, Measuring the Universe, in collaboration with the Rennie Collection, at the Cape Town Art Fair 2020.

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The Cape Town Art Fair is the city's largest art event, marketplace and exchange. A4 interacts with the fair as a curious participant, offering the public a space to interact with art.

For the duration of the 2020 fair, members of the A4 team offer to measure each visitor's height, using their name, as well as the date of their visit, as a height mark on the booth wall. What starts as a blank wall, becomes a collective artwork made by the marks of participants: an iteration of Measuring the Universe by Roman Ondák which was first performed at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2007, at the Musuem of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2009, and in 2011 at the Tate Modern in London.