Xandre Kriel prototypes a residency at A4’s off-site Art Storage facility. The studio had not yet been tested as working quarters for an artist-in-residence. Kriel took up the challenge of putting the space to work. He used the decommissioned walk-in safe for angle-grinding steel and the office as a wood and metal workshop. In the studio, he placed objects in a slender line that can be explored as a trail of philosophical prompts while providing a route to unpack the artist’s autobiography.
Of the time spent, Kriel most appreciated that different rooms provided opportunities for distinct kinds of making and thinking. An artist comfortable packing his entire practice into two crates and working from the back of a car boot at Derdesteen Beach (outdoors, in a shared public environment, and where there is the opportunity to surf and to braai along the course of the working day), the studio provided structure and tempo for his practice with space to expand, make mess, look at many different things at any one time, and in doing so rediscover some long-stored away aspects and bring these into view.
The following is an excerpt from Assembly Line and other stories based on a studio visit Sara de Beer and Josh Ginsburg paid to Xandre Kriel in the residency studio, Thursday 6 February, 2025.
First in line: an ‘els’ made by Xandre Kriel’s grandfather. The els is a handmade tool for leather working. Grasping the handle carved from goat horn is to hold hands with its maker, touching a patina moulded from years of stabbing the steel ‘spiker’ into a piece of hide. Where a needle could not easily penetrate, an els punctures the leather for thread to pass through. Parts cut to a pattern can then cobbled together into the pairs of shoes required by a goat farmer’s family and the hats that offer small salvation from the Karoo sun. An intensely Calvinist people who lived in the Sandveld region, an intractable landscape in the north-west Karoo, in Kriel’s telling:
It was not frowned upon for the farmers in this region, that when you harvested the cedar trees from which to cut the planks to build your house, you kept aside enough wood for your coffin. The wood from cedar trees is a preservative, it repels insects. Often, you would make the coffin at the same time your house was constructed, and keep it beneath your home your whole life long. In this way, you worked and lived with you death.
From this implement made for a purely utilitarian application, Kriel begins a line of enquiry through work and value in the forms he makes: furniture-like objects that are faithful to tool-like forms yet inspire unusual rest. Where they are comprised of components that are mechanical in sentiment, they inhabit a complicated status as ‘workable’ objects.
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A4 acts as custodian to a trove of contemporary artworks held in our Art Store, an art-storage facility situated a few city blocks' distance from A4's Curatorial Studio in District Six. The Art Store is home to an artist's studio for visiting artists in residence and hosts temporary installations of works. Researchers and scholars can enquire to visit the Art Store as viewings are by invitation only.
