Jonathan Ball Publishers is delighted to host the Cape Town launch of Chris Soal’s monograph To Sharpen Our Senses and Soften Our Touch, featuring contributions from leading voices in contemporary art.

Soal is a South African artist born in 1994 and has situated his practice between Johannesburg and Cape Town. His studio-based work is sculptural in its output, working with objects and materials in ways that show a conceptual engagement with the contexts and histories of the objects but that also re-enforce the body as a site for knowledge reception and production. Soal’s works seek to make a poetic statement through the simplest of means, engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness and perceptual habits while challenging core societal preconceptions of value and hierarchy.

Through his use of discarded and mundane ephemera, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, along with concrete, rebar, electric fencing cable, sandpaper and other industrial materials, the artist intuitively develops the familiar to the point of the uncanny. Soal’s works can be considered social abstractions influenced by a reinterpreted Arte Povera that is deeply rooted in and reflective of his upbringing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Working symbiotically with his materials, Soal utilises the inherent physical characteristics of the objects to transform them through processes of aggregation, combination and erosion.

Event details

Date: Saturday 13 December 2025
Time: 11:00–12:30 (artist talk at 11:20)
Venue: WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery, 16 Buiten Street, Cape Town
RSVP: akshar@whatiftheworld.com

Coffee and pastries will be provided.

Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Art Book events Book launches Cape Town Chris Soal Jonathan Ball Publishers To Sharpen Our Senses and Soften Our Touch