From the AVA's origins within the African Fine Arts Society, to the South African Association of Arts, their archive traces the history of the organisation.

A4 offers support to this initiative by facilitating the development of a technical strategy, the provision of a venue, and hardware. This collaboration offers A4 an opportunity to reflect on its own archival processes.

Scrummaging through the myriad pieces collected over the institution's 170-year history, the archive includes an array of traces, from the seemingly banal to celebrity: till-sips for a number of sausage rolls, rejection letters from the 1990s for a (so named in that era) women’s magazine, handwritten artists’ notes alongside remnants of the exhibitions that have shown at the AVA.

In attending to these fragments with careful attention and time, the AVA’s archive has been reimagined as a resource towards future research.