Kamyar Bineshtarigh turns the walls and floors of artists’ studios into poetic records of memory, process, and collaboration
In Cape Town’s Southern Guild gallery, records of process – artistic, architectural, conceptual and otherwise – are suspended throughout the space. Crumbling brickwork, reference notes, and incidental mark-making peek through ghostly lustres like a half-recalled memory. Sitting somewhere between an impression and a photograph, they are slivers of artists’ studio walls and floors, and they form the basis of Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s latest solo exhibition with the gallery.
Titled Group Show, this is Iranian-born, South African-based artist Bineshtarigh’s second solo show with the gallery, his first being 9 Hopkins in 2023. Here, the artist continues and evolves the wall transfer method discovered in the making of the 9 Hopkins works.
The process is this: Bineshtarigh and his team, gradually apply layers of cold glue to a surface, creating a peelable skin that, once removed, takes with it the top layers of paint, plaster, objects, and markings of the surface. Initially a study in memory, history, and mark-making, Bineshtarigh first used this transfer technique in an attempt to archive and better understand the physical and social histories of Woodstock through the walls of a panel-beating workshop located in the same complex as his studio at the time.
When the complex was demolished, these cold glue wall works became one of the only records of the structure – an archive of human presence, labour and the city’s shifting socio-political and economic realities through gentrification.
In Group Show, Bineshtarigh has a similar interest in tracing and preserving memory, but it is the studios of other artists that become his focus. Following an intensive period of visiting studios across Cape Town and Johannesburg, the lifted walls and floors included in the exhibition are curated snapshots of studio life, process, and layers of architectural history. Paint flecks, smears, and spraypaint on the studio walls of Boytchie, for example, give a sense of the artist’s medium and style, while sticky-taped pages and notes scrawled in permanent marker provide a window into his conceptual processes.
It’s like this with almost all of the studios Bineshtarigh visited, varying from artist to artist. While the painter Daniel Levi’s walls are coated in layers of paint, displaying a record of colour and gesture, Vusumzi Nkomo, who moves between visual art, writing, and performance, fills his walls with only references – images, academic articles, diagrams and pop-culture iconography.
Most of the walls are wonderfully disordered, oftentimes showing the inverse of a body of work – the spill areas around a canvas, the pooled paint where the wall meets the floor, impulsive swatches where a colour is tested, or a brush is being cleaned before meeting the canvas. Other walls come across as self-consciously premeditated, as if prepped by the artist for a visit from a collector.
During a visit to the exhibition in early October, I ask Bineshtarigh if he thinks any of the artists ‘staged’ their studio walls in anticipation of his arrival.
“It’s hard to say,” he responds. “Some of the walls seem a little too neat, you know, as if certain drawings or notes were placed there intentionally, but that could also be the way that a particular artist likes to keep their studio. The marks are obviously natural.”
He goes on to explain that in some instances, like when an artist had recently cleared their walls after completing a body of work, a certain degree of intervention would take place. These became overtly collaborative moments between Bineshtarigh and the artist, where the two devised a scene.
The wall of Mary Sibande is one such instance. Choice images – Sibande’s signature red dog, and the seated figure of her partner and fellow artist, Lawrence Lemaoana – bleed colour down the wall, while salvaged sculptural fragments from her life-sized ‘Sophie’ works are strategically tacked on with masking tape, all of it captured, lifted, and preserved in the glue.
In the case of Ed Young, it was the one studio where Bineshtarigh went in knowing exactly what he wanted to come away with: a perfect square of white brick wall to the scale of Young’s text-based canvas works, although devoid of text, mark, or reference. Young, of course, was happy to oblige. Its starkness in a gallery full of rich, layered wall transfers, stands out like a quiet refusal of process.
Moments like this are key to understanding Bineshtarigh’s own conceptual process, and frame Group Show as a body of work composed of more than just impressions and snapshots of studio life, but as curious and sensitive studies of contemporary artmaking in South Africa.
In mid-May, I accompany Bineshtarigh and his team to the studio of Sibusiso Ngwazi in Woodstock. Ngwazi’s not in when we arrive, but he’s given permission for the first layers of glue to be applied. The whole thing happens quickly – Bineshtarigh sizes up the studio, identifies a part of the wall he thinks will work, and also settles on a section of the floor.
While the areas are being prepped, he admires the canvases and sketches that populate the studio, remarking on Ngwazi’s penchant for portraiture. Before he leaves, he also applies a small square of glue to another section of the wall. “Just a little thank you gift for Sibu,” he says. “I’m doing one for all of the artists.”
There’s something of a window into Bineshtarigh’s own work in this considered gesture. It’s a token of thanks, but also a memento – a piece of the studio they can always keep with them. It is a rare upshot of the commercial art market that we have spaces and teams of people committed to appraising, cataloguing, and writing about works of art.
It means that art might survive to varying degrees, along with the biographies and legacies of the artists who made them. But physical spaces – the sites of making, and their attendant communities, layers of history and energy – are rarely acknowledged and preserved in a similar manner.
There’s a lot that’s been written about Bineshtarigh’s work, and about this body of work in particular, that speaks to the artist’s technique and intention: It’s an exhibition that centres artistic process; that shifts focus back to the artist studio as a primary site of meaning-making; and a way of working that troubles the idea of authenticity and ownership in commercial art spaces.
All of this is true. But what else can we glean from Group Show? Besides Bineshtarigh’s interest in preserving, presenting and studying the ways of thinking and working of his fellow artists, he is also an artist very much concerned with the community and context in which he works.
His is not a practice motivated by a preoccupation with memory, or a fidelity to archiving contemporary South African art, but rather by his interest in an increasingly vanishing present. On a walk through Seapoint, where Bineshtarigh and his parents first lived when they arrived in Cape Town from Semnan, Iran in the mid 2000s, he points out that which is no longer there.
These are the memories of structures, like one of the area’s oldest bars, razed for new development, as well as social structures, like the promenade and how its uses and functions as a public space have shifted over the years, growing more insular, less accessible. For Bineshtarigh, this is not necessarily a mournful exercise, but a reflection on the layers of time, history, and culture that exist in all spaces.
Group Show is similarly a sensitive and unsentimental reflection on a layered and shifting moment in his career, and in the spaces and communities in which he finds himself. For Bineshtarigh, it is other people, other spaces, other ways of working that allow us to make sense and meaning of a rapidly changing, disappearing present. It is an act of life-affirming celebration, then, to continue on in this precarious state, an enduring attempt at memorialising the present. Above all else, the works in Group Show prize process and collaboration over a fixed moment or outcome, succeeding in the simple act of sharing with others the great joy and mess of making art.