Without a frame to circumscribe it, enquiries into the relationship between sound and memory are often speculative and open-ended. Taking this into mind, curator Bhavisha Panchia explores aurality and its kinship to memory, transmission, fiction and speculation.
Stories and myths mutate and are embellished as they travel across oceans and between people, and speak to the possibilities of sound to propagate lineages of history and knowledge into the present and future. This series of investigations will depart from an anecdote noted in Achmat David’s The Mosques of the Bo-Kaap, wherein he describes the azaan of Imam Tuan Guru travelling extraordinary distances from the first and oldest mosque in South Africa, the Auwal Mosque in Cape Town.
– Bhavisha Panchia, 2020
A4’s Course of Enquiry is a six-month, open-ended research residency for curators and writers. Seminar sessions take place fortnightly, either in person or online, during which time A4's team and invited practitioners act as critical friends to the resident. Throughout the COE, the resident is asked to consider and prototype ways of making their research visible to share parts of their process with the public. These eventual translations of the research 'solve for form', finding a manner to express the content that works for the idea or material being expressed.