Untitled
Kevin Beasley
Artwork 2020
A photograph of Kevin Beasley's untitled resin, garment and umbrella sculpture standing on a concrete floor.
Artwork: Kevin Beasley, Untitled (2020). ‘Aid-to-trade’ garments, housedresses, handbag, umbrella, resin. 152 x 86 x 79 cm. Courtesy of private collection.
Artist Kevin Beasley Title Untitled Date 2020 Materials 'Aid-to-trade' garments, housedresses, handbag, umbrella, resin Dimensions 152 x 86 x 79 cm Credit Private collection

This work was made during Kevin Beasley’s month-long residency in A4’s Gallery and included in without a clear discernible image. Extending the artist’s lasting preoccupation with the politics of cotton to a Southern African context, the sculptures, works on paper, photographs and audio installation that comprised the exhibition were materially located in A4's immediate neighbourhood, their compositional parts (found objects, sounds, images, impressions) sourced from the city.

b.1985, Lynchburg

Kevin Beasley is preoccupied, above all, with provenance, with the inheritance of found objects, scenes and sounds. Caught between the legible and the obscure, his work blurs the divide between objecthood and personhood, gestures always to the trace of the body, and asks what cultural fragments might suggest about lives and living. His conceptual and material fulcrum is cotton, the history of cotton and everything it has come to represent in black American culture as a symbol of labour and oppression. “Cotton, it takes me everywhere,” Beasley says. “Politics, social relationships you have, you think about economics…reparations. It all just unfolds.” That his home state of Virginia was built on cotton and slave labour, and that the plant continues to grow on his family farm, invites a fraught familiarity into his work. Working with the social fabric of clothing, Beasley explores not only the past but aspirations for the future as reflected in society’s objects.

Beasley was artist in residence at A4 Arts Foundation in January 2020. During his time at the foundation, he transformed the Gallery into a studio and produced an exhibition on-site, without a clear discernible image (February 6–April 30, 2020).

Installation photograph from the ‘without a clear discernible image’ exhibition in A4’s Gallery depicts a detail of Kevin Beasley’s untitled resin sculpture constituted from “aid-to-trade” garments, house dresses, a handbag and an umbrella.
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall

The present and implied figure in A4's inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025

Path page
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall
The present and implied figure in A4’s inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025
Path page

A place to start: with personhood, with the most direct impression.

Indexical in medium, the figure named, their likeness legible.
David Goldblatt's black-and-white photograph 'Ephraim Zulu watering his garden, 179 Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. September' shows a man seated on a chair in a yard, holding a hosepipe. In the background is a dog and a woman.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Zenandi' shows a child sitting on an outcropping of rock on a grassy hill.

A more oblique example of the same mode –
Artwork photograph that shows George Hallett’s framed monochrome photographic diptych ‘Peter Clarke’s Tongue’, from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, mounted on a white wall.

Another at the edge of effacement –
Artwork photograph that shows Dor Guez’s photographic print ‘Samira’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery.

Then:

A less direct form, but still a resemblance. The sitters named, resolutely themselves. (Arranged in degrees of clarity: Dora Sowden, Terrence and Mom).

Things begin to slip.

Here, a name and the word 'portrait'. Portrait of Julia. But no likeness to speak of. Instead – gestures, thickness, muddy opacity.

Named again, an image of a historical figure denied by a child's eclipsing crayon.

There are others without overture to personhood, similarly obscured (struck through by whiteness or hidden beneath spreading blackness).

Still another, rendered faceless by fire.

Even the photographed figure at times resists the medium's ambitions to precisely transcribe their likeness, becoming ghostly and indistinct, given without name.

Or appearing as a portrait of absence –
Sabelo Mlangeni’s ‘Absence of Identities’, a black and white photograph that depicts the shadowed faces of a bride and groom.

There are then those figures that remain hidden, are disguised beneath cloth or bound in hazard tape. All betray the individual (or deity) beneath – in title or image.
A photograph of Christo's collotype print and collage 'Wrapped monument to Leonardo, Project for the Piazza Della Scala, Milan'.

Others are wholly absent, recalled in only the empty vessels of clothing: hats without heads, sleeves without limbs. Where some remember named individuals, others evoke anonymous figures.
Jo Ractliffe's monochrome photograph print 'Roadside stall on the way to Viana, from the series 'Terreno Ocupado'.
An installation photograph of Haroon Gunn-Salie and James Mathews' installation 'Amongst Men' shows casts of kufiyas suspended from the ceiling.
A photograph of Kevin Beasley's untitled resin, garment and umbrella sculpture standing on a concrete floor.

Present in degrees of likeness, or hidden, erased, obscured and absent – the body that is somebody and the body that is no body. There are others.
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