I’ve been making art for most of my life. Certainly since art school, where I majored in Sculpture at the University of Cape Town in the mid-1990s, though even before that – drawing and making things is something I’ve always done. I won an art competition at my local shopping mall in Cape Town, South Africa when I was five years old with my colour drawing of some goats they’d temporarily housed in the mall basement as part of a display of baby animals. I won a Play Mobile pirate ship but my parents wouldn’t let me have it because it was too violent, so I got the road construction crew set instead. So began the series of triumphs and frustrations which constitute the life of the artist.

Recently, I practiced as an artist-researcher for a two-year research fellowship (2021 – 2023) at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. My research area at HUMA was emerging technologies in healthcare in Africa (with a focus on AI) and the way that I investigated this was through a creative collaboration with an orthopaedic surgeon at a big public hospital in Cape Town, Tygerberg. I used their processes for scanning and 3D-printing patients’ bones to practice complex surgeries, to produce my own replica of my femur, which I turned into a flute with the help of a musician. See the exhibition I produced in completion of my fellowship, AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa, of which Bone Flute was the centre-piece.

I’m interested in art that does things: that finds new applications for technology, investigates a situation, advocates for change, catalyses relationships between people, brings interesting histories to wider attention, and so on. Of course, a drawing or painting or sculpture also does something – I still find the Realist movement of painters that I learnt about in my first year of art history a useful reference point – and I love the language of form and materials, but… I’m drawn to a mode of art you could call ‘interventionist’, based in the work of the 20th Century European avant-garde movement called Situationism, but which has taken on new application over the decades and around the world, with particular application, I argue, in the South. Anyway – I don’t make art to be part of a canon, but I am influenced by the art I’ve learnt about, and find resonance with. Making art and becoming an artist can be like forming relationships with people you’ve never met, through their work, and feeling like you’re part of an ongoing conversation to which you can add your voice.

A piece of mine which has received probably the most attention, and certainly been shown on the most high-profile platform, is my art-design wearable sculpture Suited for Subversion (2002) which I designed and made as my Masters thesis project at New York University, in the Interactive Telecommunications Program, in reference to my experiences as a creative activist and street protestor. It was picked up for an exhibition called ‘Safe’ in 2005 at the New York Museum of Modern Art, and then bought for their collection. It’s received a lot of visibility there – it must have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people in the flesh, and by many more through other media. And in September 2022 it was back on show, this time as a replica made for the exhibition Another Breach in the Wall at the Timișoara Architecture Biennial – The City as Common Good.

A past artwork I made with a friend Julian Jonker (who also gave me one of my first DJ gigs back in the day – another story) is Song of Solomon (2006). ‘An aleatoric audio collage’, it is an 8-channel audio installation that samples many versions of ‘Mbube’, aka ‘Wimoweh’ aka ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, in a sonic tribute to the song’s dead author Solomon Linda. By fragmenting and reordering compositional fragments of this ‘song of songs’, the installation questions the assumptions about compositional innovation and imitation that inform Western intellectual property law. In this jungle of sounds, the dead Author rests. It uses skills from my Masters at ITP, such as programming in Max/MSP, and continues my interest in multi-channel sound arrays that started in art school. It’s a satisfying artwork for me in combining sensation, and narrativity – it has a story arc to the experience – with the exploration of a Southern history, and advocacy (for a nuanced approach to intellectual property). Delinda Collier used the artwork recently for the cover of her book Media Primitivism (2021) on Duke University Press, in which she wrote about it in detail.

My current long-running projects African Robots and SPACECRAFT are interventions in street wire art, mostly in Southern Africa. I collaborate with and commission work from mainly immigrant wire artists in South Africa, who use skills first learnt in childhood in making the iconic African ‘wire car’. These skills we combine with interactive electronics, and other digital technologies such as 3D modelling, Virtual Reality sculpting and shared VR spaces, and Augmented Reality. We started out making a small robot starling from wire and used cell-phone parts in 2013, and by 2019 were installing a 6-metre long, half-tonne music-making spaceship sculpture in Africa’s largest contemporary art museum. Titled Dubship I – Black Starliner, the project has been to Dakar as an invited work at the 2022 Biennial, and then Tamale, Ghana, for the exhibition Dig Where You Stand. I’ve written about our work through the lens of Futures Studies, read about it here.

To be continued – in the meantime, feel free to check out my progressively out-of-date and minimally maintained personal website ralphborland.net for more of my past projects.