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.