Exhibition Portfolio
Acquisition List (2021)
Acquisition List (2021) is a text-based and sound-based answer to the polemics of inclusion/ exclusion and representation/erasure in the Stellenbosch University Museum’s fine arts collection.
“We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us"
- Bill Brown
As a critical response, Acquisition List (2021) operates as a form of curatorial intervention. Inspired by the methods of conceptual art and institutional critique, the central focus of this work is to bring the unseen bureaucracy of the Stellenbosch University Museum to the fore. The primary point of departure is thus the private institutional document from which artworks are selected for exhibition purposes: the functional fine arts acquisition list of the museum. The aim of creating a curatorial intervention at the Stellenbosch University Museum is to perform what Professor Thuli Madonsela calls “whispering truth to power” by revealing the structure beneath this institution.
Institutions are certainly powerful, they are not monoliths; they are rhetorically constructed by human designs whose power is reinforced by buildings, laws, tradition and knowledge-making practice and so, changeable, in other words, we made them, can fix them, institutions are us (Porter et al., 2000:611).