Expiry Date

As organic material changes and decomposes over time, it becomes a living record of its own existence.When used in an artistic context, these natural substances hold an indexical quality – meaning that the medium itself adds a layer of associations, as well as evidences the texture of time.

Installation photograph from The Future is Behind Us exhibition in A4’s Gallery. At the front, Kader Attia’s couscous sculpture ‘Untitled (Ghardaïa)’ resembles a town. At the back, photocopied portraits of Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon are mounted on the white gallery walls, accompanied by a photocopied UNESCO certificate.

Kader Attia uses couscous to cast the city of Ghardaïa, Algeria. An art conservator might call this ‘inherent vice’, when the fundamental nature or components of an artwork makes deterioration occur faster or in an unpredictable way.Though inherent vice has a certain negative connotation and may deter some collectors or curators, many artists choose to embrace the poetics of decay – and time becomes a medium, or a friend.

This is not a ruin. I am not representing a ruin. The crumbling of this installation throughout the exhibition is significant of life, of the living process of the architecture through time. For me, it’s very important that Ghardaïa starts to crumble, for one to think about time.

Kader Attia, in conversation with Josh Ginsburg for The Future Is Behind Us, 29 November, 2022.

The Drag Paintings host a variety of cracks, faded areas, and interesting smells. For Moshekwa Langa, the way these works behave is akin to how a memory behaves as time unfolds.The work was created by dragging canvases across the dirt roads of his childhood town, Bakenberg. With platinum mining gaining traction in the area, one day the original road might be tarred over, and red soil, like its canvas counterpart, will fade from memory.

Installation photograph from ‘The Apocalypse Pantry’, Zayaan Khan and Heather Thomson’s residency on A4’s 1st floor. In the middle, a wooden shelf with bottled preserves and plant matter is mounted on a metal gate, with worn wooden drawers and more bottled plant matter sitting on the floor below it.

As part of a residency at A4, Zayaan Khan and Heather Thompson manifested The Apocalypse Pantry as an optimistic guard against the fragile food systems of our world.A productive contradiction: inherent vice is deliberately produced to ferment the food, but in fermenting, it sustains its life. We are able to slow decay, build context, and engage in land/food justice for the sustainability of our future(s).

The process of decay might be the artwork itself.

Installation photograph from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery that shows glass globes and steel armatures from Nolan Oswald Dennis’ installation ‘garden for fanon’ sitting on the gallery floor, with the room lit in red.

garden for fanon consists of a community of earthworms and copies of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, buried beneath soil.“The worms are making soil as they’re eating books – this is a game of meaning,” says Nolan Oswald Dennis. “There is something funny about having worms in a gallery, eating a book. What makes it funny is what gives it weight.”

In these works, organic material transcends its everyday role to become a medium for exploring temporality, memory, and preservation.We are asked to consider how the destruction of material can become a creation of meaning.