Common
Exhibition 6 May–22 July 2023
Installation photograph of the Common exhibition. On the left, vinyl record covers from ‘The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember’ by Kudzanai Chiurai are arranged on a slanted white shelf. In the middle is a long wooden table with an interactive box by Mitchell Messina. Above, T-shirts with slogans from the GALA Queer Archive and SAHA are suspended on criss-crossing lines.
Installation view: Common curated by Khanya Mashabela, May 6, 2023–July 22, 2023. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Title Common Dates 6 May–22 July 2023 Location Gallery Tagline An exhibition about communal resources and collective actions.
Curator Khanya Mashabela
Credits

Artists:
Francis Alÿs
Mark Bradford
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Sabelo Mlangeni
Hanna Noor Mahomed
Gregory Olympio
George Pemba
Fabian Saptouw
Gerard Sekoto
Lerato Shadi
Guy Simpson
Sue Williamson

Archives:
GALA Queer Archive
South African History Archive
The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember

Common explores new and longstanding models of self-governance and collective action. It takes its title from ‘The Commons’, a term which signifies any resource shared and regulated by a community. Such commons are as localised as a family refrigerator, a house party, and protest groups – and as expansive as liberation movements, the art world, and online information sharing.

The works exhibited unpack and magnify the experiences and mechanisms of collective action. Together, they offer prompts for considering how we perceive ourselves within these structures, and ask how we can better prioritise trust, reciprocity, and sociability

– curated by Khanya Mashabela.

In their review of Common for e-flux, Keely Shinners writes:

“In the face of this violent world, what forms of sociality and solidarity can be fostered? In the main exhibition space, Mashabela has staged a library, complete with the books that informed her curation as well as a selection of records from Kudzanai Chiurai’s Library of Things We Forgot To Remember (2017–ongoing). This library of diasporic sounds and texts, which Mashabela refers to as a “knowledge commons,” is something of an antidote to the commercialization of everyday life. Countering this, Fabian Saptouw’s ISBN University Portraits Series (2015) remarks that the library is also a site of bureaucracy, where knowledge goes to be cataloged and archived, to become data and, in this way, to die. Hanna Noor Mahomed’s painting of the Google Docs icon performs a similar function by suggesting the thin line between knowledge circulated and data mined. What we think of as the commons, especially with regards to the digital, is in fact mired in the mud of the marketplace and its ever-present systems of surveillance.”
– Keely Shinners, e-flux Criticism (2023)
Ephemera: Mitchell Gilbert Messina’s soundbox instructions for Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember (2017–ongoing) included in Common curated by Khanya Mashabela, May 6, 2023–July 22, 2023. Image courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.
Design:
Ben Johnson

Writers:
Lucienne Bestall
Sara de Beer
Lily van Rensburg
with an introduction by Khanya Mashabela

Editor:
Sara de Beer
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Photograph of the wayfinder publication for Common, curated by Khanya Mashabela in A4 Arts Foundation's Gallery.
In search of 'the Commons'
Khanya Mashabela

Though Common prioritised expressing particular concepts regarding organisational structure in a way that was visual and relatable, it began as multiple interweaving research interests. This path offers a more explicit exploration into the ideas which underlie the exhibition. – February 1, 2024

Path page
In search of 'the Commons'
Khanya Mashabela
Though Common prioritised expressing particular concepts regarding organisational structure in a way that was visual and relatable, it began as multiple interweaving research interests. This path offers a more explicit exploration into the ideas which underlie the exhibition. – February 1, 2024
Path page

During a conversation about a potential installation in A4’s exhibition space, Unathi Mkonto shared an anecdote about a family funeral. In an attempt to make space for all of the attendees, a marquee was placed over the home’s boundary wall, dividing the party into two. The guests within the yard had easy access to resources such as the catered food and drinks. The guests outside of the wall were obliged to rely on the guests within the wall to share these resources. I was struck by this clear illustration of the obstacles faced while trying to equitably govern and distribute shared resources.
Installation photograph that depicts Nolan Oswald Dennis’ ‘model for an endless column’ a column of PET globe models, suspended from a ceiling. One is solid black, the first and last are halved.

At the time of hearing this anecdote, I was in the process of reading Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom’s Understanding Knowledge as Commons (2007). As described by Ostrom and Hess, when managing natural resources (e.g. fishing waters; forests), equitable access has to be balanced with sustainability. They are highly ‘subtractive’. In contrast, culture and knowledge are non-subtractive. In other words, reading books and listening to music encourages people to make more books and music.

In South Africa, the majority of cultural resources are often held amongst a privileged few. I was interested in how Hess and Ostrom’s design framework for more equitable and sustainable governance of shared resources could be applied in this context.

Social was a project which made a call to cultural workers to submit visual material from collaborative art projects to be archived and exhibited. We surveyed contributors about how they were able to create and maintain their projects without engaging in the commercial art market. This was the beginning of Common.
A photograph of Gerard Sokoto’s ‘The Milkman’, a framed oil painting, hung on a white wall. It depicts residents from the suburb of Eastwood buying milk from the titular milkman.

Through artworks and archival objects, Common aimed to use relatable examples of varying forms of resource pools, to illustrate how widely the concept can be applied throughout everyday life. The exhibition also sought to show the benefits of a well-governed commons, and the obstacles faced in its pursuit – keeping in mind the values and needs of the people who use it.

How are aesthetic signifiers used to communicate access to a common resource pool?

Solidarity

Abundance
Sabelo Mlangeni’s ‘Ikhekhe Lomshado’, a black and white photograph that depicts a layered wedding cake.

Familiarity
Installation photograph of the Common exhibition. Guy Simpson’s untitled life-sized acrylic painting of a refrigerator is hung on a white wall with the bottom of the painting nearly skirting the gallery floor.

Common also gestured towards the issues concerning the state of the commons in digital spaces. While reading Shoshana Zuboff’s The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), I was interested in the contrast of the Web 2.0 dream of the Internet as a commons, prioritising open access, interactivity, and collaboration (e.g. sites like Wikipedia) vs the monopolistic corporations which mine our behavioural data and control the information that is served to us based on financial imperatives.

We are no longer the subjects of value realization. Nor are we, as some have insisted, the ‘product’ of Google’s sales. Instead, we are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us. We are the means to others’ ends.

– Shoshana Zuboff (2019)

Installation photograph of the Common exhibition. Hanna Noor Mahomed’s ‘Google Docs’, an acrylic and wood sculpture of the Google Docs logo, is hung on a white wall.

Online paywalls and regional restrictions, the proliferation of subscription plans, and so on, are the digital counterpart to the physical barriers which restrict our movements and access in the name of property ownership and nationalism.
Gregory Olympio's acrylic painting titled ’Paysage Grillage 10,’ hung on a white wall, depicting the pattern from a chain-linked fence.

Common enacted the ideas expressed by the artworks in the exhibition by contributing to the cultural commons. In addition to the protest T-shirts, loaned from GALA Queer Archive and the South African History Archive and carefully documented by A4 in a publicly accessible database, we collaborated with Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot To Remember.

The Library is a collection of archival materials produced throughout Africa during the liberation movements of the twentieth century. A4 digitised a selection of The Library’s vinyl records, and artist and curator Mitchell Gilbert Messina used his technical ingenuity to create a tactile audio system. This system enabled visitors to play reproductions of the records as they wished, while maintaining A4’s role as custodians of the original objects.
Installation photograph of the Common exhibition. On the left, vinyl record covers from ‘The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember’ by Kudzanai Chiurai are arranged on a slanted white shelf. On the right is a long wooden table with an interactive box by Mitchell Messina. Above, T-shirts with slogans from the GALA Queer Archive and SAHA are suspended on criss-crossing lines.

The exhibition’s central table served as a place for the public to listen to music and to read books about the histories represented within the exhibition, as well as the ‘Common Course Reader’, a collection of essays and book extracts which informed the exhibition and expanded upon some of the ideas it referenced. A full bibliography can be found on the last page of the exhibition’s wayfinder.

Event photograph of the roundtable discussion for the Common exhibition in A4 Arts Foundation's Gallery. In the middle, roundtable participants are seated around a long wooden table. Above, t-shirts from the GALA Queer archive and South African History Archive are suspended on criss-crossing lines.

Finally, returning to Social, the table also acted as a space for discussion. Practitioners who had co-founded project spaces were invited to discuss their experiences. Topics included how to find exhibition spaces and other resources, conflict resolution, sharing the responsibility of management, sustainability, and access.

Projects included in the roundtable discussion:

Under Projects, FEDE Art House, YOUNG BLACKMAN, and Adjective.

"With YOUNG BLACKMAN, the main thing was to give artists the space to do what they couldn’t do in commercial spaces."
– Ed Young

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"There were many reasons YOUNG BLACKMAN ended – and we can keep those buried. Fundamentally, it ended because the question was 'do you want to be a commercial gallerist?' and the answer was absolutely not."
– Matthew Blackman

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"A lot of people at the Kimberly Hotel would say 'This isn’t art, it’s rubbish,' and I’d say more people have probably looked at Kendell Geers’ broken windows than have looked at most artworks in South Africa. Many people who were walking by YOUNG BLACKMAN at night would stop and look in. Many of them must have thought 'that must mean something…this must be meaningful in some way.' It may have gotten a lot of people angry, but a lot of people engaged with it."
– Matthew Blackman

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"YOUNG BLACKMAN informed Under Projects. It was an exciting thing to see in the first year of art school. I got my head shaved in Gerald Mashona’s exhibition. In hindsight, to me it filled a space in the ecology. The hope was to be in the National Gallery by forty years old, and in the commercial galleries by thirty, but what was I supposed to do in my twenties? And here was this space. This is where you are supposed to be experimental. It was helpful to see that step, which is usually missing in the post-art school narrative."
– Mitchell Gilbert Messina 

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"Because independent project spaces are not archived or accounted for, there is the continuous feeling that you are the first person to do it. Once a project is gone, and all the people who saw it are gone, the people who come afterwards are left with no roadmap and no sense of what could be. I want to gather all of this information and make it publicly accessible so that you don’t have to be in the right ‘scene’ to find out about it."
– Khanya Mashabela

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"I think initially when we decided to make a project space, we wanted it to be ‘open open’. We did an open call and received many proposals and portfolios from people who had seen us on Instagram but who had never actually been to the space. And then we realised that there was something generative in tightening the exhibitions to people who actually contribute to a sense of community by being there all the time and attending exhibition openings. We like the idea of being very local and creating a tight-knit community, rather than wanting to be as big as possible and inviting big international names."
– Mitchell Gilbert Messina

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"What I have learned is that it is very easy to start a project space. You just have to be boldfaced and silly and reckless. The hard part is sustaining it."
– Mitchell Gilbert Messina

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"People are often talking about why there aren’t many independent publications writing about art, and the answer is very simple. When you plan an exhibition you have to pay for the space and perhaps some installation and production costs, but you don’t have to pay every single artist in order for them to agree to exhibit their work. Every writer will say that they need to be paid for the labour of writing for a publication because, unlike with artists, there is no chance of money coming in down the line if a work sells. Either you get paid for your writing or you don’t get paid."
– Khanya Mashabela

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"We all have other jobs. That is how we are able to afford the idea of Under Projects as a non-commercial space. The amount of capital needed to begin a project space is so high that it seems ridiculous to be an experimental space when you could be entrepreneurial instead. Part of the reason that Under exists is because of the pandemic. Rent became more affordable."
– Mitchell Gilbert Messina 

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"These collaborations are a lot like bands in the sense that personal relationships exist alongside more formalised working relationships. Some bands last forever, but our band needed to break up. And that is what it was, a break-up."
– Matthew Blackman

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"Projects happen and then go away, happen and then go away. That is fine, as long as they keep on happening. If they want to become stable and continue, they grow into something else and take on another role in the art world. It is sad when projects end but they are probably at their most interesting when they first begin."
– Ed Young 

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"I was interviewing Siemon Allen about Flat Gallery in Durban, and what struck me as being the biggest impetus to begin a project space is a sense of frustration about being excluded from something that you desperately want to be a part of. Perhaps there has to be a sense of exclusion for new project spaces to begin – 'This art scene is cliquey. Screw them, I’m going to start my own clique!'"
– Khanya Mashabela 

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"YOUNG BLACKMAN began just as the financial crisis was happening. Ed [Young] has mentioned his irritation at the period of stagnation that happened after YOUNG BLACKMAN ended. I think this generation of artists and cultural workers needed their own financial crisis and that ended up being the pandemic."
– Khanya Mashabela 

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

"It does get to the point where it is difficult to not ‘consolidate’ your model. The first few shows are exhausting and you are making everything up from scratch. And then it gets to the point where you say to each other, 'a video always works best on that wall' and 'last time we put a sculpture there and it looked great.' Eventually the exhibitions become repetitive and you have to force yourself to open things up in some way. I think that is why the idea of relinquishing control of the space to someone else is interesting."
– Mitchell Gilbert Messina 

Invited practitioners joined curator Khanya Mashabela in a roundtable conversation centred on artist-led project spaces and collaborative exhibition-making. The engagement formed part of Mashabela’s wider research project, Social, and took place in the Gallery during Common, extending the exhibition’s reflections on collective action and shared resources. Matthew Blackman and Ed Young (YOUNG BLACKMAN), Carol Khaas and Lebo Kekanna (FEDE), and Mitchell Gilbert Messina (Under Projects) contributed to the conversation.

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