African Robots
Hot Mesh This is Hot Mesh, a modular system for space-making and shade-casting, made of finely woven wire joined by clips 3D-printed in recycled plastic. Its first iteration is MAYA (named for the artist Maya Deren and her surrealist film Meshes of the Afternoon). Hot Mesh exemplifies the application of skilled handcraft to humble materials to create valuable […]
Local Gundam Local Gundam is a project for Streetopia 2023 in Observatory. You can find it at the corner of Trill and Lower Main Road outside the Taproom. You may be standing there right now looking at this on your phone. It features a local version of a Japanese Gundam robot, or mecha, made from […]
Shapeshifting Chandelier is a ceiling-mounted wire art sculpture that incorporates programmable colour-changing lamps. It’s installed at the entrance to the Gorgeous George Hotel in Cape Town. We’ve described it as ‘a passionate entanglement of hand and machine with a vegetal theme’. It uses the form of the Protea flower indigenous to Cape Town (and found in other […]
SPACECRAFT Screenprints SPACECRAFT XW01, MF01 and TF01 2017 Ralph BorlandScreenprints on paperPrinted by Black River StudioEditions of 25 66 x 51 cm each These screenprints, produced by hand with fine art master printmaker Wim Legrand at Black River Studio in Cape Town, South Africa, suspend graphic depictions of the wire-frame SPACECRAFT sculptures over psychedelic space […]
DS Tableau DS Tableau is a large-scale sculptural installation with animated lights and text-scrollers, installed at the entrance to the local offices of an international corporation in Cape Town, South Africa. It is a SPACECRAFT project, the sister project to African Robots, executed with Southern African street wire artists who are highly skilled at constructing […]
Zimbabwe Space Station This is an ongoing project to depict a Zimbabwe Space Station, which draws on the iconic forms of Great Zimbabwe in a symbol of future African achievement in interplanetary exploration, in collaboration with Zimbabwean immigrant street wire artists in Southern Africa. The project works through image and sculpture: a public artwork in […]
Anthropophagic Octopus식인낙지 From 22 May – 30 June 2019, African Robots lead artist Ralph Borland was on an art residency at the Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju, South Korea, with support from Business and Arts South Africa, making work for exhibition at the International Symposium of Electronic Arts 2019.
Dubship I – Black Starliner (2019) This project, a collaboration between African Robots and our sister project SPACECRAFT, was created in 2019 with funding from the National Arts Council of South Africa, and exhibited in the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the exhibition Still Here Tomorrow… from […]
Zizi Night Light Zizi is the Shona for owl – we hope this night light helps you zzz easy! Just turn on the power switch, and adjust the dial till the eyes are off in a lit room and on when it’s dark. Then every night when lights go out Zizi wakes up.
Red Owl This ‘Red Owl’ was made during workshops for the International Symposium of Electronic Arts in Durban, South Africa in 2018. We usually base all our robots on specific local creatures, but this one was more of a fantasy owl! It’s made using red ‘scooby-wire’, the name we use for telephone wire. This has […]