Southern African artist Ralph Borland (he grew up in South Africa and Zimbabwe) has been dreaming up fresh ideas for artwork for a long time: from Suited for Subversion, his riot suit for protestors bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2005, to his monumental music-making spaceship sculpture Dubship I - Black Starliner, launched at the Zeitz MoCAA in 2019, exhibited at the Dakar Biennale, and acquired by Red Clay Studio in Ghana in 2022 — and a whole lot in between.
His current obsession is his complex interlocking sculptural system XOX, made through a combination of hand and machine work, which came to him in a dream that he sketched out as he woke up.
Where ideas come from, the role of imagination and how it interacts with technology, are topics he’s been investigating while the inaugural artist-in-residence with EthicsLab at the Neuroscience Institute at University of Cape Town, housed at Groote Schuur, one of South Africa’s biggest public hospitals. There he is exploring the mind and brain, ethics and the use of emerging technologies in health care. We caught up with Ralph after just having had his brain scanned in the institute’s fMRI scanner, while sculpting, drawing and imagining a new sculpture he’s designing for the institute.
How does an artist come to be working with neuroscientists?
Good question! Well, you could say the brain is central to everything we do, and so there’s an openness at the Neuroscience Institute to working with people from a range of disciplines — from literature to music and the arts. And I’ve been working with scientists for a long time now, particularly through the institution Science Gallery. I’m part of a local collective of artists and academics across South African universities called Uncertain Entanglements that is placing artists in science institutions. It’s a global movement (one of the most famous programmes is at the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland) going back decades.
What are you hoping for from having your brain scanned?
I’m curious to see if anything shows up as brain activity related to imagination and inner visualisation — we’ll see! I’ll be happy to acquire a detailed 3D model of my brain, as well as an idea of localised activity in it while I sculpted, drew and imagined. This is the latest in a series of works that repurpose body parts or functions: first was Suited for Subversion, a suit for protestors that broadcast their heartbeat out of the body, which has been seen by millions of people over the years at New York MoMA. More recently I made Bone Flute in collaboration with an orthopaedic surgeon at Tygerberg Hospital: a flute made from a 3D-printed scan of my own femur. So it’s gone from (heart)beat to bone to brain!
And what else are you doing for your residency?
The work I was visualising in the scanner is a sculpture made mostly from dichroic material — a film that reflects and refracts light in different ways depending on your perspective — that I’m proposing for the Neuroscience Institute. I’ve been working with it for the last few years, starting with an outdoor sculpture proposal commissioned by City of Cape Town. There’s a maquette for that piece installed at Kaleidoscope, an art site in Joshua Tree, California. This year I designed an interior dichroic installation for the new restaurant Tambourine on Harrington Street in Cape Town. It’s a beautiful material, and the form of the sculpture should suggest ideas about shifting perspectives and the networked structure of the brain.
And what else is on your mind at the moment?
I see what you did there! Well I started out with something new a year ago — a sculptural system called XOX — which has been growing and growing both inside and outside my mind! It’s part of my African Robots project; I started collaborating with street wire artists over ten years ago, making robot birds and insects and a giant music-making spaceship which travelled from Cape Town to Ghana. XOX is our first foray into abstraction. We made a complex wire-art sculpture (titled Hot Mesh: MAYA) inspired by architectural forms from Great Zimbabwe’s stonework to Mozambiquan burglar bars and breeze blocks, that took 10 wire artists almost 100 days of work to make. It centres on a single repeated piece that I call the X-module - it looks a bit like a figure with legs apart and arms above their head. That led to the smaller-scale sculpture XOX Toy, 3D-printed in plant-based plastic with magnetic connectors, which we’re selling as a limited edition at imaginexox.com. You can support the development of the project by ordering one for you or a friend!
It’s been productive responding to people’s interest in the project from here and abroad. Our friend Inka Kendzia for example (we’ve been part of the same art-tech creative scene in South Africa for almost 30 years) is a video artist, and she recently commissioned an all-white XOX Toy to practice projection-mapping on. She took her set to Berlin and has been shooting it there with video overlaid on it. All-white looks really dope, and it’s given me the idea to make an all-black one for the recent Black Friday (discount code to readers is ALL-BLACK at our Shopify store africanrobots.com).
• Ralph is giving an open presentation about his art-science residency at 1pm on Tuesday December 2 at UCT’s Neuroscience Institute, in Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town.
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