Bibliography: pages 61-63. / The content and form of the work completed for this degree is intended as a narrative. This narrative is constructed to tell stories of my family, and of myself, in a way that openly stresses the playful, mythical, and fictional nature of such narratives in the family and in history. These narratives are not always easily recognisable, believable, or unified, and are read through an arrangement of details. Initially, I intended my tableaux to function as 'emblematic' portraits. In other words, I intended to describe the members of my family by distilling their essential characteristics into a descriptive arrangement of symbolic objects. Although I became aware of the limitations of symbolism, and became more interested in narrative and display, the content of my work has remained personal and descriptive, even though I have emphasised the fictional over the elegiac. My family is not really one of collectors - my grandmother tore up and burnt many of our family photographs when my grandfather died, before she went into an old-age home. She wanted to 'travel light'. What we have left are the stories, the anecdotes and the proverbs: an oral history, or a ·postmemory'. These inherited tales are told through the snapshots that did survive, as they are in all families who take pictures. I have retold and reconstructed my own narratives, because this is the nature of the family romance for everyone - it resides in a world of images, incidental details, and surfaces.

This project attempts to tie together different threads of my experience. It begins with the memory of looking through the garden fence and hedge of my childhood and considers the simultaneously separate and enmeshed lives of my immediate family and those outside of it. In this project I have engaged with the garden as a point of connection, a means by which to consider the possibility of more Edenic, sustainable futures rooted in concepts of care. An investigation into care, through my making, has been central to my research. Under the harsh structures of apartheid, the natural world carried on in spite of the social and environmental restrictions implemented by the apartheid government. I am interested primarily in human experiences of care, belonging and relationship against the backdrop of migrancy, the displacement of discarded people to infertile land, and the loss of indigenous cultures and natural areas. My intention in this work is for the viewer to be reminded of the unending cycles of nature - seasons, joy, nurturance and recurrence - in their silent yet peripatetic way. In this turning towards nature there is a recognition of the spiritual essence of the world as separate and distinct from humankind's inhumanity to each other. In a contemporary context, the prevalence of people from across Africa displaced into South Africa demands a closer consideration of human connections to the land, as does the recent crisis of Syrian migrants in Europe and the ensuing ethnic xenophobia. At present there are 60 million people displaced due to war, religious tension, politics and race. However, there is hope in the care provided by non-governmental organisations, the United Nations, governments and grassroots initiatives; people who want to help those with a bag and a child on their back.

Absences in archives render as impossible access to the fullness of the past. Yet, within the post-apartheid sociopolitical milieu, demands are made of the slivers of evidence in colonial archives to yield more than they contain, to provide material from which counter-colonial narratives may be fashioned. I understand these demands as pressure exerted on archives. In this thesis, I consider this pressure in relation to historical narrations of the lives of two women from the colonial period of the Cape: Krotoa and Anne. Krotoa was a Goringhaicona woman who acted as an interpreter between the Dutch and the Khoekhoe in the early colonial period at the Cape (from 1652). I examine extant literature on Krotoa to show the various ways in which authors have responded to the pressure on the archives in which she appears and how they have dealt with absences within them. I then discuss a number of instances in the archives to demonstrate that the imprint of absence is clearly visible in these archives. Anne was a Scottish noblewoman who lived at the Cape from 1797 to 1802. I investigate the literature about Anne to show how scholars have responded to the pressure on her archive primarily by overlooking the absences within it. I then consider two aspects of Anne’s archive to demonstrate that it, too, bears the imprint of absence. In contrast to approaches to absence that seek to fill in the gaps in archives, I argue that paying attention to the imprints of absence enables us to begin to grasp something of absence in its own right, that is, the negative space of an archive that constitutes a form of absolute absence. I have named this absolute absence in archives the “anarchive”. Identifying the imprints of absences as indicative of the anarchive has led me to instantiate the anarchive through figuration. This is achieved via visual art methodologies in which I systematically avoid reconstruction and instead convene an archive of photographs whose subject, and the curatorial rationale behind their display, is emptiness and transience. My figuring situates the anarchive centre stage and proposes engagement with it as a means of escaping the constraints of archives. When the full extent of the anarchive is brought into view, the limitations of archives are sharply delineated and their ability to control our understanding of the past is rendered absurd.

Employing the media of video and installation, Homunculi of the digital city explores what it means to live in a digitally-mediated city. In my work, I personify both the city and city dwellers as cyborgian characters, by drawing on Donna Haraway's definition of the cyborg. I expand my personification further by employing the Homunculus from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust II (1950, originally published in 1832). I utilise Matthew Gandy, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie's discussions around the broader city so to consider the material and immaterial elements that constitute it. The screens that populate contemporary cities embody both these elements: they are physical objects that perform invisible data, in the vein of Boris Groĭs' analogy of an image file being analogous to a piece of music that needs to be performed in order to be sensible. By drawing on these frameworks, I position the city as a high density of screens that are physically ubiquitous, often a prosthetic, and function as a gateway to the immaterial elements of the city.

In this thesis I examine the University of Cape Town (UCT) Manuscripts and Archives Department object collection, providing insights into the origins of the collection and its status within the archive. Central to the project was my application of a set of creative and affective strategies as a response to the collection, that culminated in a body of artwork entitled Slantways, shown at the Centre for African Studies (CAS) Gallery at UCT in 2014.The collection of about 200 slightly shabby, mismatched artefacts was assembled by R.F.M. Immelman, University Librarian from 1940 until 1970, who welcomed donations of any material he felt would be of value to future scholars. Since subsequent custodians have accorded these things, with their taint of South Africa's colonial past, rather less status, for many years they held an anomalous position within the archive, devalued and marginalised, yet still well-cared for. The thesis explores the ways in which an interlinked series of oblique or slantways conceptual and methodological strategies can unsettle conventional understandings of these archival things, the history with which they are associated, and the archive that houses them. I show how such an unsettling facilitates a complex and subtle range of understandings of the artefacts themselves, and reveals the constructed and contingent nature of the archive, as well as its biases, lacunae and limitations in ways that conventional approaches focusing on its evidentiary function allow to remain hidden. This set of slantways strategies includes the use of a cross-medial creative approach, and my focus on an a-typical, marginalised and taxonomy-free collection. Also important is the incorporation of my visual impairment as avital influence on my artwork, leading to an emphasis both on unusual forms of seeing and on the senses of smell, touch and hearing. Furthermore, my choice to follow a resolutely thing-centred approach led me to engage very closely with the artefacts' materiality, and subsequently with their actancy as archival things, which in turn influenced my conceptual and creative choices.

Includes bibliographical references / The thesis identifies an equivalence between two seemingly disparate art-forms - Homeric poetry (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and sculptural assemblage. The synthesis of form and content achieved by the re-organization, manipulation, and transformation of pre-existing components in the theory of an oral-formulaic Homer is explored by means of a practical application of sculptural assemblage. The thesis proposes that Homeric poetics and sculptural assemblage are sufficiently similar in terms of structure, methodology, and interpretive processes, to enable a sculptural evocation of the participatory interpretive aspects of Homeric composition in performance that is comprehensible to a contemporary audience. The development of an iconography of an oral-formulaic Homer is expressed in a series of twelve sculptural assemblages entitled A Catalogue of Shapes 2010-13. These sculptures are composite object portraits of twelve Homeric characters. The creation of this catalogue of characters was informed by core structural, compositional, and conceptual aspects of the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships as a reflexive site of artistic self-awareness. A Catalogue of Shapes therefore represents a composite object portrait of an oral-formulaic Homer. The representational system underlying A Catalogue of Shapes incorporates complex connotative allusions achieved by the manipulation of symbolically-invested materials, objects, and forms to reflect the compositional strategy underlying Homeric poetics. As an 'aesthetic translation' this series of sculptural assemblages comprises the creative and contextual re-interpretation of attributes characteristic of the form and content of an existing text/artwork, by means of creating another. It is both an autonomous artwork and an extension of an existing creative tradition.

This research interrogates the different strategies and methodologies employed by collectives (with a focus on South African collectives in the past two decades) to raise fundamental questions about art; the nature of artistic work, forms of production, authorship, autonomy and collaboration as an artistic strategy. The research sets out to explore collaboration as a field of art practice. The criteria for selection of the collectives in the research was each collective needed to comprise of three or more artists who have produced and authored work together under an umbrella name, they also needed to use multi-disciplinary practices. The selection included: Galerie Puta (2003), Avant Car Guard (2004), Doing it for Daddy (2006), Gugulective (2006), Centre for Historical Enactments (2010), Burning Museum (2013) and iQhiya (2015), Guerilla Girls (1985), Laboratoire Agit’Art (1975), Raqs Media Collective (1992), Ubulungiswa/Justice and Karoo Disclosure (2014). The idea of shared authorship is the central tenet around which all collective practice revolves. This thesis looks at the collective authorial voice as a strategic artistic practice in contemporary art that enables reappraisals of artistic production. Furthermore it interrogates the decentralization of authorship, as an artistic strategy to shift paradigms of thinking in relation to power structures, be it institutional, political or ideological.

The core difference between machines and humans is that humans have consciousness and life, albeit some machines designed and created by humanity are able to make decisions, facilitate intellectual enhancements and even develop physically. Humanity is dependent on a network of machines and technologies that transfer power to and engage with residences, industries and day-to-day activities, and as much as it is humanity that advances technology, they equally evolve with and through technology. This ever-evolving technology has become so integrated with human bodies and minds that it has a disturbing range of control over critical aspects of their lifestyles, to the point that humanity may be functionally impaired without it. Humanity has mechanised the simple act of being human but continues to build machines and develop technologies that act, look and respond in an increasingly human way. It is no longer possible for humanity to simply switch the machines off, because if they do, they may switch themselves off as well. The artworks and associated written dissertation of In the Flesh, set out to explore the sensitive symbiotic relationship between humans and the machines.

The sudden and drastic impacts the recent global health crisis had on my life, and on society more broadly, triggered intuitive processes of creation, whereby its context was difficult to grasp in the beginning. Thus, my motivation for conducting this research stemmed from a personal worry about the dystopian situation outside of my private sphere. The many social upheavals caused by the pandemic would ultimately shape my thinking through creative production. This allowed me to grasp the many intangible aspects of my life and my conception of the world in a productive way; and connect many disparate aspects through a process of corporeal engagement that, literally and figuratively, stitched emotional and conceptual ruptures together as can be observed in the art objects displayed in the exhibition. This body of work thus explores the complexity of the act of repairing as a frame for art-making: as a means to articulate strategies of care in times of isolation, with the full knowledge of an indefinite outcome that does not sully the endeavour. My former profession as a surgical nurse, a profession of collective care-taking, and profiled as an ‘essential worker' during this pandemic, has had a substantial impact on this project. My specific interest is the transition from an act of care-taking for a stranger into artistic processes in isolation, that nevertheless involves a manner of care despite important differences. The times of social separation made me realise how interconnected we are. Thus, RePair is an attempt to emphasise the importance of relational perspectives wrought from the two subject positions I inhabited as a nurse and as an artist. I consider this document in conjunction with the body of artworks displayed as a means to explore the transformative potential of a relational and affective set of aesthetic considerations in a time of a shared crisis.

Includes bibliographical references. / Writing about redress 1 -un-dressed, giving my voice to the work, is probably the hardest part for me. It was my voice which was silenced when, as an eleven year old, I stepped into the witness box of the Cape Town Magistrates' Court. In the end my only defence was silence, as each consecutive question of the defence distorted my personal story until my position of victim turned into that of perpetrator. That is to say, the perpetrator was released and I went to jail. Not literally. But the effect of the trauma shaped who I am today. This experience triggered my ongoing investigation of systems of control, positions of power and causes of trauma which I explored in my undergraduate year in 2007. Comfort Room - ukhuselekile - Speak out 1 was a psychologically charged installation which explored aspects of secondary trauma experienced by children in the judicial process. The current body of work moves beyond the trauma as it investigates processes of redress. For that reason the details of the initial events are no longer the primary concern; strategies of transformation are at the heart of this investigation. This brief detour outlines my personal motivation and interest in these strategies, or forms of redress, which lead me to juxtapose processes of what I have termed aesthetic redress against processes of judicial redress. I therefore stage the fictional case of R v Judicial Redress 2010 (R v JR 2010) 2 in this document and my practical body of work.