As a journal dedicated to sculpture, it may seem odd that many of the artworks discussed in the first issue of FORM have roots in painting, photography, music, performance, and film. I find comfort in Olu Oguibe’s expanded view of sculpture and the recognition that today, ‘most contemporary art, be it sculpture in all its expanded dimensions or performance or new forms of painting or digital imaging, all the way down to NFTs,’ are indebted to art forms and traditions from Africa that broke the rigid confines inhibiting European artists at the turn of the twentieth century from thinking beyond the limits of their respective traditions.

Oguibe’s observation highlights the importance of not getting bogged down by reductive definitions, and to not limit our lens in such a way as to curtail a fruitful engagement with other modes of practice that occupy a more fluid ambit. As such, his contribution, “The Question of ‘Africanness’ and the Expanded Field of Sculpture,” which introduces this issue, sets the tone. Rather than focussing on works that fit neatly within formal definitions of sculpture, this issue places emphasis on the sculptural. Underpinning all is a focus on time, and with it, memory and loss, boredom and desire, patience and impatience, accumulation and excess, the material and immaterial...

Penned in 2019, Stacy Hardy’s “Theme for Exile” can be read as a poetic ode to Dumile Feni. Originally published by Ellipses as part of a triptych, the story is based on the author’s experience of Feni’s scroll at Wits Art Museum (WAM). At once corporeal and ghostly, it gives shape to the shapeless. Like the scroll, its rolling verse thickens and thins. Overflowing ashtrays and empty beer-bottles mark an absent-presence. Repetition fights against loss, excess, obscurity. Yet throughout one senses the desire to hold on: ‘To collect them up, the faces, the voices, pin them to the page. Always that tension, that balance, to cast history into the pit of erasure with one hand and with the other retrieve the shards that can be salvaged, to restore them, deranged by the passage of time.’

This aching futility, the question of how to remember, is echoed in Raqs Media Collective’s “The Double Act of Flower-Time.” Writing at the intersections between individual and collective memory, their focus is the ‘figure of the unknown soldier,’ ubiquitous the world-over since the advent of the First World War, and the attempt toward memorialisation. ‘The war produced death on such an unprecedented, industrial scale,’ write Raqs, ‘that the actual dimensions of mortality, and attempts to account for it, could be apprehended in symbolic terms not so much through the figure of the named individual but through the deployment of the figure of the statistical average of casualties — the ghostly residual trace of the anonymous and fatally injured body of an unknown everyman-at-arms.’ Here, the tone that marks also carries within it ‘a fatigue of the count...’ Memory ‘straddles a paradox... a negotiation between having to remember, the obligation to mourn, the uncertainty of moments and conditions of its activation, the inability to recall, and the slow grinding requirement to forget and move on.’

We felt this same paradox play out during COVID-19, when fatigue coupled with a ‘retreat to the safety of the digital world.’ For the artist-duo Thukral and Tagra (“Arboretum”), this retreat exposed a ‘glitch’ in the ‘mechanics of a system or, in this case, a society,’ as well as ‘a lifting of the veil, exposing who has the privilege of safety and who has no choice but to go on as they were.’ Here, the glitch becomes a constitutive means through which the duo question how to nurture a society that has lost touch with itself and the finite material base on which it depends.

In “Fences: Between Order and Paradox,” Marc Ries reflects on Mathias Weinfurter’s installation Indices (2020) at the HfG Oggenbach in Main, Germany. Produced during COVID-19, the work comprises a film and twin wire-mesh fence, from which ‘posts have been removed, cut out; the resulting gaps... inconspicuous to the fleeting eye.’ For Ries, these gaps ‘signal a sensitive infringement of the disciplinary order. They interrupt the grid’s regularity.’ So doing, they create a ‘foothold,’ a means of transgression. Once again, it is the glitch that enables one to overcome a given limit or blindspot.

Importantly, however, Ries pinpoints a second intervention to counteract the first, a mirror, creating the illusion that the fence is whole. ‘This restoration of the grid’s order, thus of the boundary’s power, is a visual effect,’ notes Ries, ‘a mirage that, on the one hand, reconciles, reassures those who desire the closure, the separation; on the other hand, it remains unsettling, since there is still the hope, the possibility of overcoming the limits set by the boundary.’ That Weinfurter draws inspiration for this intervention from ‘rehabilitation mirror therapy,’ which enables amputees to overcome the ‘trauma of the injury and [eliminate] the phantom pain,’ should tell us something about the place of memory in the body and the ways in which we might reinscribe order where none exists.

The demarcation and appropriation of space — ‘the possession and disposession of land’ — is also central to Sean O’Toole’s reflection on the work of Jeremy Wafer, “This is no place for lovely pictures.” Recognising the integral (yet overlooked) role of photography in Wafer’s oeuvre, O’Toole unpacks the artist’s indexical engagement with and relationship to land, particularly that of his home country, South Africa. The difficulty inherent in O’Toole’s paper is implicit in the opening passage, which juxtaposes the nine short days seperating Steve Biko’s arrest at a roadblock in the Eastern Cape to the shooting of Wafer’s Ashburton (1977). In contrast to the enforcement of boundaries and the curtailing of Biko’s freedom of movement, Ashburton depicts the artist ‘standing in an unfenced clearing, surrounded by ankle-length grass and thorny scrub,’ his arms hung ‘limply’ at his side. As writes O’Toole, Wafer ‘resembles a surveyor’s assistant, albeit without a rod or perch to render his action explicable. The wide frame of the composition reduces Wafer to a diminutive presence, a figure, a type, an adult white man standing in an undulating savannah.’

O’Toole’s observation mirrors Ries’s, namely, that fences affirm ‘a very old dualism: between an inert, unchanging, proprietary entity and a mobile, changing, non-proprietary entity. In other words, the dualism between property and elements that are free to move.’ Later, O’Toole quotes Wafer on his choice of location:

The site chosen was somewhat arbitrary. It was accessible to the road, near enough to the town, not obviously fenced or demarcated: available and ‘empty’, an open space. There is of course no ‘empty’ land, all of it being owned and possessed in various forms: freehold, leasehold, traditional communal ownership or more informally claimed and occupied, and in a South African context the possession and dispossession of land has shaped a violent and tragic history.

Where O’Toole positions photography as an instrumental precursor to Wafer’s ongoing engagement with land, sculptural or otherwise, my own text, “A Place to Daydream,” unpacks the role of photography and social media in the afterlives of Amine El Gotaibi’s ephemeral installation Sun(w)hole (2019); the former for its capacity to orientate and the latter to disorientate.

As a rammed earth structure — ‘a condensation of both natural and man-made elements: earth and concrete, but also stones, grass, glass’ — Sun(w)hole epitomises the kinds of sedimentation discussed in Stefanie Koemeda’s “Fast Twin.” Based on a hypothetical expedition into space, she asks what we might find on our return: ‘Human-made plateaus,’ comprised of ‘materials that, although familiar, would be geologically transformed...: cities, monuments, airports, railway networks, and ports’ which, subject to weathering and decay, ‘would create a sedimentary rock consisting mainly of materials that humans created or enriched — forms comprised of iron, aluminium, bricks, ceramics, and glass...’

Penned while in residence at NIROX, Sudeep Sen’s “Quartet of Poems” intuits this plumb-line. A response, in part, to different artworks in the Park — Willem Boshoff’s Children of the Stars (2009), Richard Long’s Standing Stone Circle (2011), Richard Forbes’s Sacred I (2023)... — Sen’s poems marry earth and sky; our ‘terrestrial histories’ bound to ‘this fossil-craddled terrain-DNA’, this ‘cosmic clockwork.’ If Koemeda and Sen cast doubt on the distinction between the “natural” and “artificial” world, Ashraf Jamal’s “Dust: An Intimation” — a reflection on the work of Nina Barnett, Jeremy Bolen, and Alexander Opper — tells us that no such parsing is possible. His essay begins by quoting Michael Marder: ‘Humans are nothing but dust looking through dust at dust’; a reminder that the will to order and cleanliness is farcical; that ‘life is an ever-forming formlessness, that any manifesto must remain incomplete, that what we espy and deem the truth is nothing other than a gradation in a blur.’

Jamal’s words feel apposite within the context of Ramzi Mallat’s “Ticking Today and Teetering Tomorrow,” a reflection on his work, We Are What We Know (2018). Here, however, life’s residue takes shape in the form of onethousand coffee cups, one for each individual encountered by the artist during different tasseography sessions within his community in Lebanon. Described by the artist as ‘time capsules’, each cup ‘engages with, revives, and reanimates the past, whilst also distorting dormant anterior moments.‘ Grouped en masse, the work raises questions about the nature of personal and collective memory, especially as they relate to nationhood. ‘While these cups are revered as a national emblem of Lebanon for having the colours of the flag on them,’ explains Mallat, ‘they were made in China and imported to serve as trinkets for tourists and nationals to remember the country.’ A gap emerges between what one knows and understands of a place, a time, and the objects of memory.

This gap is ever-present in Gary Charles’s “Archiving Futures: Digging in the Crates of Always,” as well as Inga Somdyala’s “The Beloved Country.” In the former, we learn about the role of companies like Spotify in flattening our understanding of time and space; creating supposedly universal platforms that enable us to move freely between the local and global whilst collapsing the possibilities for understanding difference and contextual specificity. Similarly, Somdyala’s reflection unpacks the use of an arbitrary signifier — the flag — and its capacity to unify. His paper highlights the fraught ‘notion of a collective “national identity”’ within the context of post-apartheid South Africa. He draws on personal experience of South Africa’s education system, as well as the writings of of Zakes Mda, Bessie Head, Sol Plaatjie, and Benedict Anderson, to make a case for how ‘certain historical narratives are used to forge a national history as something that has existed for eternity, in order to create a sense of collective identity where none existed before.’ So doing, Somdyala argues that the very ‘idea of nationhood... is haunted by its own inability to consider the full dimensions of history.’

Somdyala’s words resonate with those of Lawrence Lemaoana (“I’m Tired of Marching”) whose installation — an automated protest machine — stems from a sense of fatigue, encapsulated by Martin Luther King Jr’s frequently quoted phrase: ‘I’m tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth.’ As notes Lemaoana, ‘That line has become ingrained in society’s psyche. With every generation it reactivates, but differently.’ The repetition of such iconic statements is a common thread in much of his work. While emphasising the importance of what is being said, their repetition across space and time also points towards a particular failure to listen. ‘It’s almost like I’m tired of being tired,’ explains Lemaoana. ‘I need an outlet, somebody to do it on my behalf. I need to be able to go chill on the beach, and the machine can speak for me.’

Repetition is also central to the discussion that follows, between Usha Seejarim and Walter Oltmann (“An Antidote to Boredom”). Here, however, it becomes the basis for a sensory, embodied, and transformative engagement with matter, as well as the transformative potential of the accumulation (and by extension, defamiliarisation) of everyday objects. Speaking about her use of clothes’ pegs, Seejarim notes: ‘By itself the peg is quite rigid, but when you join them together they soften. They’re skin like. I can bend and curl them. A peg by itself can’t do that, but as a multiple it can. So it’s about exploring what they can be when they’re together. In the same way that a thread on its own is very different to cloth. Cloth is magic.’

Matter is also an important consideration in Nkgopoleng Moloi’s “Noria Mabasa’s Storied Sculptures.” Writing about Bird Sculpture (2020), for example, she observes a push and pull with the ‘structural possibilities of the medium.’ If such a consideration is important for Moloi, however, it is not because of any deconstructive logic, but because, in playing at ‘the edges of a clearly defined pictorial plane,’ the artist refutes the imposed demarcations between art and life, waking and dreaming, this world and the “next.” After Moloi, Mabasa’s art is seen, not as a ‘product of an indeterminable divine intervention but a combination of technical training, dreams, the spiritual, metaphysical and the somatic, all bound together...’ The join is important, if only for its ability to push back against the ‘misreadings and erasures’ that complicate our understanding of Mabasa’s drive, ‘her compulsion to create in the manner that she does.’

Such a merger is also present in Lukho Witbooi’s “Groundwater,” which concludes this issue. Set across two time-zones, 1985 and 2005, his story muddies distinctions between then / now, here / there, waking / dreaming life. In one of the more climatic moments, it even troubles the distinction between its two protagonists, Sibahle and Tsohle; the former attempting to use the latter as a conduit to commune with the world of the living.

It goes without saying that many of the papers gathered herein have lives elsewhere. Which is to say, not all are “new,” and some of those that are will eventually find new life in a different context. My thanks to each of the contributors for allowing us to republish their work. My only hope is that, when read together, the reader is left with some kind of impression, a sense of wonder, perhaps, about the mysteries that shape and give substance to our lives.