If you’ve ever wondered what an artist’s brain looks like while it’s busy hatching a new sculpture, Ralph Borland is currently finding out — literally. The Southern African artist, known for his playful collisions of imagination, engineering and activism, has been shuttling between his studio and an fMRI scanner at UCT’s Neuroscience Institute, where he’s the inaugural artist-in-residence with EthicsLab.
It’s an unusual pairing on paper: a sculptor in a hospital basement, wandering past neurologists with his sketchbook. But Borland, who grew up in South Africa and Zimbabwe, has made a career out of treating boundaries as materials rather than limitations.
This is the same artist who created Suited for Subversion, the anti-riot suit for protesters that broadcasts the wearer’s heartbeat — an early 2000s provocation now housed in MoMA, New York. He followed that with Dubship I – Black Starliner, a monumental, music-making spaceship exhibited from Zeitz MoCAA to the Dakar Biennale. Recently, he turned a 3D scan of his own femur into a playable bone flute. Heart, bone, brain - a conceptual anatomy lesson.
Borland’s latest fixation is XOX, a sculptural system that arrived first in a dream, then in sketches, and is now sprawling into increasingly sophisticated forms. One of them, Hot Mesh: MAYA, is a monumental wire art piece developed with a team of 10 street wire artists over nearly 100 days — a conversation between Great Zimbabwe’s stone geometries, Mozambican burglar bars and the everyday vernacular of Southern African design.
Another iteration, the handheld XOX Toy, is a modular, 3D-printed construction set with magnetic connectors, already being snapped up as limited editions at imaginexox.com - a do-it-yourself sculpture that’s both pastime and decor. There’s even an all-white set that video artist Inka Kendzia has taken to Berlin for projection-mapping experiments. An all-black version drops on Black Friday; Lifestyle readers, Borland insists, should use the discount code ALL-BLACK at africanrobots.com.
But back to the brain scanner. While lying inside the machine — drawing, sculpting, imagining — Borland hopes something of that inner theatre will appear in the data: the choreography of visualisation itself.
Even if it doesn’t, he’ll walk away with a detailed 3D model of the organ he’s been chasing conceptually for years. It will inform a new dichroic sculpture he’s proposing for the institute, a shimmering form that shifts colour and meaning depending on where you stand, much like the mind it honours.
For those who want to hear the artist think out loud, Borland will present his art–science residency at 1pm on Tuesday 2 December at the Neuroscience Institute, Groote Schuur Hospital. Bring curiosity. Borland will bring imagination.
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