A4 Arts Foundation hosts a Sikkum to connect with the friends, colleagues and collaborators who participated in the curatorial exchange between A4 and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Participants from Cape Town travelled to Chicago for ten days and received a reciprocal visit from their Chicago counterparts (Felicia Mings, Hendrik Folkerts, Antawan Byrd, Faheem Majeed, Michal Raz-Russo, Jacqueline Terrassa) a few months later. Along the way, practitioners on the ground in both territories were invited to participate in a series of events, presentations and explorations. The Sikkum gathered many of these collaborators together to reflect on the exchange.

The exchange noted the histories of extreme segregation in both Chicago and Cape Town. It sought to understand the inequalities that exist within the cultural fields and the ways that these relate to economic sustainability and viability for curators and artists working within and beyond existing art world models. It asked after the mechanisms that have been developed to counter, re-organise and create spaces of access, cohesion, belonging and cultural agency for marginalised groups and collectives.

The Curatorial Exchange was made possible with a grant from the McArthur Foundation.