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Proto, Gardens (2025)

09/01/2025

In collaboration with William Kentridge, A4 has produced a hoodie that features a sketch included in the exhibition History on One Leg, a browsable selection from the artist’s studio notebooks made over the past fifteen years, together with other tools, routes, and processes of studio work.

Limited stock available in-store now

23/02/2023

'unclear zine' is a limited edition photographic zine and poetry book created by and that was released 2nd of February in conjunction with a series of photographs prints at Youngblood Gallery.
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In February 2022, for the second time in 13 years, Lauren Westerhout, a q***r disabled performance artist, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and underwent hip to femur replacement.

Simultaneously, they began our collaboration to bring the intimate experience of disability, medical interventions and recovery into art form.
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Available in-store and online now.

21/02/2023

iconic ‘Leafball’ light is available to purchase in-store and online now.
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Galvanised steel wire, post-consumer plastic waste, cable ties; 500mm diameter, R2500

17/02/2023

On the occasion of this year’s Exhibition Match, proto~ invites painter Callan Grecia to design a limited-edition T-shirt. Sampling Y2K internet aesthetics, early-2000s streetwear, pop culture and consumer culture, Callan’s compositions reflect an “ultra-nostalgia” for the recent past; a conflation of millennials’ dreams and discontents. That football fandom is a recurring reference in Callan’s work first suggested this collaboration. Each T-shirt features the Exhibition Match logo with a custom line drawing on the front, and a reproduction from Callan’s painting included in the Cape Town Art Fair on the reverse.

Available at the match for R650. See you there!

14/02/2023

: Hypothesis 1 is the debut collaborative project from and . Their shared enquiry into botany, biology and art centres on the guiding question: “What do plants really want?” At once resisting and quoting traditions of flower arranging, the pair’s botanical compositions become a medium for spending (more) time with organic matter and listening to the non-human sentient. The plants, shifting and changing over the course of the project, insist their autonomy – some wilt, others send out aerial roots, growth and decay persist.

Cynthia Fan is a florist and PhD candidate at The University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences. Hayden Malan is a landscape architect and artist. Together, they share a preoccupation with the sculptural potential of plants as both natural organisms and modular structures.

27/01/2023

One of our favourite photobooks, Larry Sultan’s ‘Pictures from Home’, has been reimagined as a play!

“In 1982, on a visit to his parents in Los Angeles, the photographer Larry Sultan came across home movies of his childhood, among them those that show the aftermath of his family’s move west from Brooklyn, the city of his birth, to a land of lawns and beaches and road trips and new cars in perpetual 1950s Southern California sunshine.

‘They were remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than actual events,’ Mr. Sultan wrote in ‘Pictures From Home’, the 1992 book he eventually made in response to these ‘30 years of folk tales’ that had been etched in collective familial memory as historical record. The book became a landmark in narrative photography — part of an iconic body of work both deeply personal and conceptual, lyrical and honest, merging images and text.

Mr. Sultan died in 2009, but his work and legacy have helped draw three major stars to the Broadway adaptation, the rare play based on a book of photography.” – Rebecca Bengal for The New York Times

Shop ‘Pictures from Home’ at proto~, online or in store.

15/12/2022

In collaboration with proto~, the store at A4, Gitte Moller presents Your heaven is in my eyes, a series of lamps that are at once functional objects and discrete artworks. Each comprises glass panels with illustrations of the four seasons in a style reminiscent of both gothic arabesques and 90s video game graphics. Within these illustrations, signs and symbols drawn from religious painting, dream symbology, and online fan art possess a secretive and shrine-like quality. Illuminated at night, Your heaven is in my eyes becomes a glowing portal to a celestial realm – a dream landscape of the artist’s imagining. Framed and wired by Cape Town-based furniture designer Philip Kramer, Gitte’s lamps pair childhood nostalgia with early-internet aesthetics.

20 x 20 x 42 cm
Available in pink, blue, black and natural wood at proto~ from Saturday 17 December, 2022

18/11/2022

‘An advent calendar of other people’s pictures’ by launches tomorrow
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Each year, before Christmas, Gabrielle Guy makes an advent calendar for her younger sister, Tabitha. Because Gabrielle is a bookmaker, these calendars take the form of books. On each page, Gabrielle has hidden something. The pages must be torn (beginning December 1 with the final page broken open on Christmas day) to reveal its surprise. Gabrielle’s practice is as precise as it is playful. A devotee of humble things – bricks, corners, stones – and hidden moments, it is difficult to write of her accomplishments because she shies away from ever mentioning them. It is up to this writer to insist on doing so. At the time of writing, Gabrielle is the designer of more than 200 artist books and catalogues, for all of South Africa’s most renowned artists. The list includes William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi, Jo Ractliffe, Igshaan Adams, Penny Siopis, as well as Phaidon’s African Artists, to mention only a few. The number excludes books of her own photographic practice – of ‘things to look at’ and ‘pictures of pictures’ – to paraphrase Gabrielle’s titles.

A practice in sisterly love and devotion since 2014, this is the first year that these advent calendars are available to be purchased and shared.

15/11/2022

This Saturday (19 November) Dominique Cheminais launches her novel, The Windmill, at proto~ with a reading at 12pm. Accompanying the launch, Dom presents Girls in the Woods at Goods, a culmination of her short residency in A4's fast-paced project space. We're open from 10am–2pm on Saturday. Entrance is free. Join us!
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Dominique Cheminais takes up residence in Goods on the occasion of the launch of The Windmill, the second book in her Many Shallows series. The Windmill offers a fictionalised account of the life of Milena Jesenská, Franz Kafka’s second great love. Central to the narrative is the potential for metamorphosis. Dom is practised at shifting shape. Recently, she has reassumed the role of painter – her head is flung back, ponytail whipping, as she paints upon the ceiling; with chalk in hand, she advances with the physicality of a ballet dancer across Goods’ signature blue walls. But Dom is the writer, first, of these gangling legs, whose third breasts and four-fingered hands she authors into being. Accompanying her in Goods is the character she has created of herself, performed with wit and dexterity in a high-gloss finish. Her artist husband, Zander Blom, plays the role of her assistant. Sitting on the ground, he cuts up paint swatches and labels her bottles. A4’s team members take turns pushing her scissor lift back and forth.

19/10/2022

‘Customs’ curated by Sumayya Vally & Josh Ginsburg may have concluded but we are happy to announce that the

‘Serpentine Pavilion 2021 Sumayya Vally, Counterspace’

catalogue is back in stock!
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On the occasion of Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Sumayya Vally, Counterspace, Serpentine has co-published a catalogue with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Richly illustrated and designed by Joseph Kohlmaier, it includes contributions by a number of artists, poets and writers including Siphokazi Jonas, Lesley Lokko, Courttia Newland, Ain Bailey and Imani Robinson and an interview between Sumayya Vally and Sir David Adjaye OBE, the project's curator Natalia Grabowska and Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

19/10/2022

‘Customs’ curated by Sumayya Vally & Josh Ginsburg may have concluded but we are happy to announce that

‘Serpentine Pavilion 2021 Sumayya Vally, Counterspace’

catalogue is back in stock!
_

On the occasion of Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Sumayya Vally, Counterspace, Serpentine has co-published a catalogue with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Richly illustrated and designed by Joseph Kohlmaier, it includes contributions by a number of artists, poets and writers including Siphokazi Jonas, Lesley Lokko, Courttia Newland, Ain Bailey and Imani Robinson and an interview between Sumayya Vally and Sir David Adjaye OBE, the project's curator Natalia Grabowska and Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

28/09/2022

Thrilled to be the first stockist of Errant Journal on the continent.

Errant Journal is an international publication for cultural theory and practice aimed at bringing together diverse local perspectives on a global scale.

All three issues available in-store and online.

20/09/2022

One of our all time favourite books ‘Hockney’s Alphabet’ is available at proto∼ in-store and online now.

In the final years of his life, the English poet, novelist and social justice advocate Sir Stephen Spender undertook a playful and poignant labor of love — he asked artist David Hockney to draw each letter of the alphabet, then invited twenty-nine of the greatest writers to each contribute a short original text for one of the letters. The result was the 1991 out-of-print treasure Hockney’s Alphabet. All proceeds going toward AIDS research.

The twenty-nine pieces — essays, poems, micro-memoirs — come from such titans of literature as Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Martin Amis, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Ted Hughes, Ian McEwan, Erica Jong, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Iris Murdoch.

07/09/2022

Thrilled to say that three of David Shrigley’s things will be launching this Saturday at the

Come join us from 11:00 to see the intervention in Goods and shop .a4

28/08/2022

Just arrived at the for the final day of the Cape Town Art Book Fair, come listen to the talks and browse our books 📚

25/08/2022

We are launching Christian Nerf’s embroidered ‘Polite Force’ hoodie this Friday at the Cape Town Art Book Fair hosted by the

Come find us in the Atrium to warm up your weekend!

23/08/2022

The Guerrilla Girls present the Gorilla Mask Tote Bag, that with embroidered cut-out eyes doubles as a gorilla mask for Crusaders on the run!
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The Guerrilla Girls are a collective of anonymous artists who wear gorilla masks in public and use facts, humour and outrageous visuals to expose discrimination and corruption in art, film, politics, and pop culture. In 30 years, they have come up with over a hundred posters, street projects, actions, books, and billboards. Most recently they did a stealth campaign in New York about the super rich hijacking art, and a wall in Reykjavik about discrimination in the Icelandic film industry. Their retrospective in Madrid has drawn thousands of attendees. They travel the world putting on gigs and workshops, inspiring others to create their own effective activist campaigns.
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Available at proto∼ in-store and online now🦍

Proto

09/01/2025

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21/02/2023

17/02/2023

14/02/2023

27/01/2023

15/12/2022

18/11/2022

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19/10/2022

19/10/2022

28/09/2022

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