Authorship, presence, and the poetics of trace
Contemporary Art Honours alumnus Kamyar Bineshtarigh presents a body of work that quietly upends exhibition conventions. His latest presentation, Group Show at Southern Guild (Silo 5, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town), reimagines the studio as an archive and the gallery as a site of careful salvage, becoming an elegant meditation on authorship, presence, preservation and impermanence. The exhibition runs 21 August–10 November 2025 and will be on view in Los Angeles from 13 September–4 November 2025.
Rather than filling the white cube with newly fabricated canvases, Bineshtarigh turns to the residues of making: the lived surfaces of artists’ studios. Using a meticulous surface-transfer process, he lifts layers of paint, dust, tape, notes and habitual marks from those workrooms and re-composes them as monumental panels and assemblages. What results feels at once archaeological and intimate, a chorus of other people’s gestures held together by a single curatorial hand. In doing so, he blurs boundaries between artist and curator, between studio and gallery, and between solitary practice and collective memory, while asking what and who endures in the life of an artwork.
The title, Group Show, is both accurate and mischievous. We encounter many voices and traces of peers and predecessors, yet the exhibition is unmistakably authored. Bineshtarigh’s selections, edits, and framings transform salvaged matter into a coherent visual and conceptual field. The works raise questions about care and custodianship: How do we keep the fragile sediments of practice, such as lists, colour tests and fingerprints, without fossilising them? What does it mean to curate material that was never intended for display? Bineshtarigh’s exhibition at Southern Guild captures this tension with clarity, describing how the project unsettles the roles and spaces we usually take for granted in exhibition-making.
The gallery setting sharpens these stakes. Installed across Southern Guild’s luminous volumes, the transferred skins read like palimpsests, weathered, precise, tactile, and ghostly. Their physicality, from ripped edges to stains and seams, keeps the works grounded in real rooms, labour, and time. Standing in front of them, you do not only look, but you also listen for the hum of activity that made them. The show peels back layers and reveals the private tempo of studios across the city, a quietly generous homage to the communities that sustain artistic life.
From ctca to the broader art world
Bineshtarigh’s practice did not emerge in a vacuum. His Contemporary Art Honours year at Cape Town Creative Academy foregrounded many of the competencies that make Group Show resonate now:
- Research-led making: The project’s methodical transfers and indexing of surfaces show a researcher’s patience, testing processes, documenting outcomes and building arguments through material rather than rhetoric.
- Curatorial literacy: Treating studio remnants as exhibition content demands sensitivity to context and display. CTCA Honours critiques train students to design exhibitions, think about the viewer’s experience, and explain ideas clearly. Those skills are evident here.
- Ethics and professional practice: Working with other artists’ studios requires consent, collaboration and careful attribution. CTCA’s emphasis on professional standards, reflective writing, and art-world protocols prepares graduates to navigate these complexities.
Together, these capacities have helped Bineshtarigh stand out in a competitive art world, not only with striking objects but with a distinctive approach to authorship and care that feels both rigorous and generous.
Why this show matters now
At a moment when contemporary practice is saturated with images, Group Show pivots our attention back to process, to the thinking-through-materials that happens when no one is looking. It invites us to consider the studio not as a mythic sanctum but as a shared ecosystem of habits, tools, conversations and traces. By carefully relocating that ecosystem into the gallery, Bineshtarigh asks viewers to witness how art is lived as much as it is made.
Group Show is Bineshtarigh’s second solo exhibition with Southern Guild, and it builds on a trajectory of projects that explore mark-making, language, and the textures of the urban environment. If his earlier exhibitions listened closely to the walls of his own working world, this one listens outward, to the wider chorus that makes an art scene possible.
See it in person at Southern Guild, Cape Town, before 10 November 2025.
