Using the exterior and interior facets of the building at 23 Buitenkant Street to create a series of pinhole cameras, George Mahashe transforms the second floor at A4 Arts Foundation into a real-time cinema. Focused through impromptu holes cut out of cardboard frames and lenses culled from reading glasses, light filters into the darkened space as an inverted projection of the external surroundings. A collection of screens and boxes collect the light, cropping and faceting an otherwise 360-degree projection.

Additional pinholes are created by existing gaps in the wooden flooring, which are directed through wooden boxes and sheets of tracing paper. This enables a projection of the first floor into the second-floor space.

Using everyday objects as technology, this quiet assembly of overlapping and moving images is a deeply mesmerising encounter with perfectly ordinary scenes. Rooted in Mahashe’s sanguine critique of photography, history, anthropology and the archive, the images produced within the installation are delivered unassumingly as sly insights.

This project was produced across a staggered residency within Mahashe’s PhD project prior to the renovation of A4's premises at 23 Buitenkant Street.