A laboratory for the arts, A4’s curatorial studio in Buitenkant Street supports practitioner-led processes and offers visitors opportunities to engage with artistic production. For Design Week 2026, the foundation’s programming affords insights into book- and magazine-making as creative practice.
Design Week Opening times:
Thursday and Friday October 22nd and 23rd 9am–5.30pm
Saturday October 24th zine launch and exhibition 10am–2pm
Closed Sunday October 25th
In the gallery, A4’s curatorial team explores printed matter as a site for artistic production, playfully titled Interior Design, across a trio of installations. The project riffs on artist Cameron Platter’s central presentation, ‘Inferior Design’, bordered on one side by ‘Annual General Report’, an open studio in which a board report is reimagined as a high-gloss magazine of features, and ‘Dressing’ on the other, a bookmaking exercise that revisits A4’s Sightlines project. Interior Design pokes at tensions between the categories of ‘fine art’ and ‘furnishings’ (might one add, ‘fashion’?).
In the bookstore, Cameron Platter’s My Work Here Is Done, the sixth in a series of zines published by A4 and connected to Platter’s installation in the gallery, launches in Cape Town on Saturday, 24 October following its release in New York at the Printed Matter book fair on September 24. Compiled in a grey envelope, the photographic publication, accompanying text, and additional objects excerpted from artworks trace the history of the ELC Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift and the artist’s collaboration with the Centre’s weavers towards a series of tapestries.
A4 Store hosts a wide selection of art and design books, ranging from recent titles to out-of-print editions. Visitors to A4 during Design Week will encounter printed matter in its various stages – from proposition to process to realised publication in the library, bookstore, gallery and cafe.
Makhundai, a clothing brand guided by the moral code ‘Be a Good Farmer’ is installed in A4 Store for the Design Fair weekend. Makhundai invites reflections on clothing, conscience, culture, and creative collaboration.