Customs
Exhibition 2 July–8 October 2022
Installation photograph from the ‘Customs’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery. Dor Guez’s vinyl work ‘Double Stitch’ features vinyl line drawings that stretch across the gallery floor and wall.
Artwork: Dor Guez, Double Stitch (2022). Vinyl. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Title Customs Dates 2 July–8 October 2022 Location Gallery Tagline An exhibition that asks: what is it that invites us to make use, and to be of use?
Curator Sumayya Vally Josh Ginsburg
Credits

Participating artists:
Dor Guez
Yoko Ono
Steve McQueen
Kapwani Kiwanga 
Igshaan Adams
Frida Orupabo
Ezrom Legae
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Nairy Baghramian
Binelde Hyrcan
Peter Clarke
Willem Boshoff 
Moshekwa Langa
George Hallett

Customs takes its cue from a series of photographs taken by Sumayya Vally in Saudi Arabia in 2021. The images record a number of roadside mosques of varying architectural structure and opacity, forming sacred and ceremonial space. Vally writes:

I became interested in how the community of itinerant users were encouraged, by the structures themselves, to read them and make use of them. They were infrastructures for gathering, and further, inherent in these same infrastructures were invitations to participate in their making and upkeep.

Customs wonders after practices of maintenance, both static and dynamic. What is it that invites us to use, and to be of use?

Accompanying the exhibition is a wayfinder offering reflections on the artworks as well as prompts for visitors to enact or consider as they interact with Customs. Included is an offering by Vally:

Hold the intention in mind, or utter the words, 'Here lies the boundary.' This is all you need to make any space a sacred one.

Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece (1966/2018), installed in the Reading Room as part of Customs, carries its own instructions from the artist for visitors to participate in ‘mending’ irreparably broken pieces of cups and saucers, making these anew.

Mend with wisdom
mend with love
mend your heart.
It will mend the earth
at the same time.
(y.o.)

Installation photograph of Steve McQueen’s neon tube and acrylic paint sculpture ‘Remember Me,’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, that shows the phrase “remember me” described in neon tubing with the front covered over with acrylic paint and mounted on a white wall.
Artwork: Steve McQueen, Remember Me (2016). Acrylic paint on neon borosilicate tube. 12 x 51 x 3 cm. Private collection.
Design:
Ben Johnson

Writers:
Lucienne Bestall
Sara de Beer
Margot Dower
Lily van Rensburg

Editor:
Sara de Beer
Download
Photograph of the wayfinder publication for Customs, curated by Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg in A4 Arts Foundation's Gallery.
Event photograph from the opening of the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery that shows Yoko Ono’s installation ‘MEND PIECE, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town version’ in A4’s ground-floor Reading Room. A close-up view shows participants constructing sculptural forms using ceramic fragments, twine, tape and scissors on a white table.
Opening: Customs curated by Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg, July 2, 2022. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.

"What is a map and what is a plan? To my mind, the one accounts for what is known, the other projects into space."
– Josh Ginsburg

Curators Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg lead a walkabout of Customs, asking after themes of maintenance, ritual, and embodied knowledge.

"Exhibitions spatialise ideas. When one has the chance to make one, especially in a collaborative way, ideas emerge in dialogue. To see them located, distilled, or contained while interacting with other ideas is pleasurable. We get too familiar with our ways of being. The ambition is to bring someone else in and see how we can extend or expand upon an ongoing enquiry. In simple terms, this project has been an enquiry into how ideas traverse time and the vessels they traverse in. We are curious about how these ideas can open up."
– Josh Ginsburg

Nick Axel joins Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg in conversation, exploring ways of imaging the past, activating rituals that continue to serve, and reframing the exhibition as a walking practice.

"This is an interesting idea to superimpose over a gallery, to view a gallery as a site, or to see an exhibition’s configuration as a walk... It’s curious to think about walking as a form of mapping. As you traverse the land – a space – you are taking something in. Simply walking maps out the terrain."
– Josh Ginsburg

Nick Axel joins Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg in conversation, exploring ways of imaging the past, activating rituals that continue to serve, and reframing the exhibition as a walking practice.

"In Islam, there is not a formal process of consecration and deconsecration as it exists in Christianity or Judaism. You simply say, 'This is a sacred place', and then it becomes a sacred place. Once you say that, there is no way to undo it, the place is forever sacred. Sacredness is not tied to an object in the space, it is about a set of ritual acts which take place within a space. In the images of the roadside mosques, I see a manifestation of this declaration of a sacred boundary and a niche, which points towards Mecca."
– Sumayya Vally

Nolan Oswald Dennis joins Sumayya Vally in conversation, sharing his work garden for fanon (2021) as a conceptual fulcrum in thinking through themes of ritual and care in Customs.

"In Islam, one can’t simply destroy or discard the Qur'an. If one needs – for some reason – to dispense with a copy, it must either be buried or burned; returned back into the earth."
– Sumayya Vally

Curators Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg lead a walkabout of Customs, and ask after maintenance, ritual, and embodied knowledge.

"The bleed between places, geography and time becomes hybrid. I’m thinking about the way jazz brings different geographies together, I’m thinking about past references, chants, the present, and how improvisation works. It presents a method of archiving that is generative."
– Sumayya Vally

Nick Axel joins Sumayya Vally and Josh Ginsburg in conversation, exploring ways of imaging the past, activating rituals that continue to serve, and reframing the exhibition as a walking practice.

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