Includes abstract. / I had been living in South Africa for almost a year by the end of 2010, when I instigated a series of creative collaborations with seven individuals, symbolically understood to represent the heterogeneous assortment of relationships that make up real-life social worlds. The people I began working with comprised those closest to me, those I live with, friends living in distant parts of the world and others that I have never met, but whose work or labour I have so greatly admired that I considered them to be an integral part of my world. I extended seven invitations to join me in a dialogue from which we could produce a visual artefact together. I asked that this dialogue address experiences and thoughts on the relationship between the individual and another; what makes us feel intimate and what causes us to feel estranged. The core aim of this project has been to develop a methodology/process that will produce art from dialogue. I centralised the need for the process to be sensitive to the identity and values of all those involved and capable of a deep engagement with the particularities of that encounter. Through this, a space between individuals is activated from which genuinely new ideas/social meanings are formed, and art produced. I regard this process of formation rather than affirmation as an approach that can redistribute agency in the production of meaning. Communication theorist Sara Diamond notes a distinction between collaboration that is ‘simply working together, creating in a context where there is an intention to either make that relationship on-going or create a product of that labour’, and the kind of collaboration that is ‘the process which combines the knowledge, experience and previous understandings or methodologies that are substantively different from that which the participants or even the partners entered the relationship with’ (Diamond 2003). Her distinction points towards a need to balance inter-subjective dialogue with the preservation of individual identities. Diamond’s later definition of collaboration implies that participants actively engage with difference, and resist conflating the initial diversity that made collaboration an appealing prospect in the first place. In this model, however, there must be an awareness of the limits of communication to represent an external reality as a shared reference. This is potentially a paralysing limitation: if communication of any kind can fail, where does this leave us? Shedding the security of relativism (of subjective expression) in exchange for the perilous task of cumulative, inter-subjective engagement has been key to the development of these eight experiments. The artist in this framework is a provider of ‘context’ rather than ‘content’, entering into collaborative encounters and communicative exchange (Dunn, cited in Kester 2004: 1). This document outlines the complexities of collaborative works, so as to do away with an easy reading. It contextualises the subtleties that define the collaborative approach in which I am interested. Much of what I understand about the work we have made, and the process that produced it, has only come about upon reflection and as a result of countless exchanges and conversations with the seven individuals I have worked with. As such I present the following document as both a retrospective of the collaborative experience, as well as a condensed cluster of ideas that help anchor this project’s core meaning. To structure this ‘research’ document, I have divided my work into nine chapters. The first describes my methodology in a wider context of collaborative practice from an ontological and genealogical perspective, before refining the key concerns that inform my making. These are: the space collaborative art occupies; a pluralistic sensibility towards multiple perspectives; and, finally, the role of dialogue in collaborative projects. The subsequent seven chapters are the visual and textual documents of the process of each collaboration. They illuminate aspects of the process specific to the seven working partnerships. Through separating each partnership my aim has been to preserve their authorship and prevent each collaboration from collapsing under the weight of my own agency. However, the process that unfolds in each of the chapters is only the process thus far, and many of these projects continue to evolve and form a part of my ongoing practice. I regard this research and the practical work it supports to be the generation of a specific collaborative methodology.

This body of work is comprised of individual pieces that differ in media and scale, forming a series of linked and related encounters. All the works find their origin in an eighteen-month period of living on a hospital ship in West Africa, and the story of this time forms the basis of this book. In addition the intense and emotional experience of caring for a friend in the last few weeks of her life brought into focus thoughts of living and dying that seemed to be reflected in much of what I encountered on board. This book is a reflection of both my working process and the experiences, images and ideas that gave rise to it. I have tried to present the ambiguities of 'the ship', the paradoxes it embodies and its source as the inspiration for my work while at the same time hinting at its rich resonance in terms of both maritime histories and the literature it has generated.

Includes bibliography. / This thesis examines the University of Cape Town (UCT) Permanent Works of Art Collection in order to determine its relevance to, and status within, the university. The text traces the historical and current roles of the university art collection in general, before focusing specifically on the UCT art collection’s history, including the contexts, events and personalities which shaped its development, from its embryonic beginnings in 1911, to the present. In an era which demands clear correlations between the allocation of resources and relevance to institutional goals, the contemporary university collection is under pressure to demonstrate its potential as a useful educational and interpretive tool within the university (the so-called ‘triple mission’ of collections: teaching, research and public display), or risk being consigned to obsolescence, even destruction. Based on a survey of the UCT art collection’s holdings, interviews, and a combination of bibliographic and archival research, undertaken between 2011and 2014, the thesis establishes that, whereas most university collections were traditionally constituted for the purpose of teaching and research, or for the preservation and exhibition of historical artefacts pertaining to a university and/or a specific discipline, this collection does not precisely fulfill either function.

Includes bibliographies. / This body of work is an experiential study which aims primarily to investigate the effect of the Western medical anatomisation of myself - the cancer patient - on and through my artmaking. The dissertation aims to contextualise my practice - to situate it somewhere between the different readings of cancer according to the Western theory of disease, the Eastern and New Age understandings of the body and ill health, and the work of other artists. It seeks balance between these competing discourses and looks for integration through them. The responses of other artists to their ill bodies are described, several of them exploiting medical technology, others subverting the language of the dominant discourse and the image of the 'good' patient with a 'bad' body. My own work attempts to make art around and out of the experience of cancer. The artmaking is an attempt to gather an understanding of my condition and to integrate art and life. The challenge is to visually represent this. I began the work with an ambivalence - was I an activist helping others, or was I merely immersed in my own struggle to maintain sanity, to reach a peace with my body, a calm space from which to deal with my condition? I have dismissed this ambivalence and settled on the latter position, which has the indirect effect of helping others. I have realized, like Jo Spence, that it is easy to burn yourself out when you work from a position of anger. Art and science have exploited and depicted the body throughout their history, sometimes in ways that overlap, sometimes at cross purposes that conflict, and sometimes in mutually supportive ways. When examining the binaries of revealing and concealing, visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, one cannot avoid a conflict with the medical system. However, through the excavation of my body by modern medical technology, I have evolved from previously seeing only the horror of a tumour to now also seeing the hidden beauty of the other landscapes inside my body. My artmaking is thus taken up as a personal issue, not attempting to shock or to be placatory, but to externalize the cancer experience and, rather than simply reacting to it, to find the beauty inside my body.

Includes bibliographical references. / In order to meet the requirements for the MFA degree at the University of Cape Town I proposed to create a body of sculptures based on studies initiated during my year of study for the Advanced Diploma in Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. These studies involved the observation and formal analysis of certain functional structures relating mostly to industry, and led to the making of sculptures characterised by formal reduction and abstracted 'constructivist' forms. My intention for the MFA study was to pursue this methodology and to extend the scope to include architectonic elements relating to both interior and exterior structures and spaces, as well as other objects such as machines. My source material was largely taken from 19th-century technical illustrations of industrial machinery for the reason that the functions of the chosen mechanical structures were overtly expressed by the constituent parts, which became the compositional elements of my sculptural abstractions.

My project is an exploration of process within the painting medium, themed round my experiences of 'self' and community, as located in my past and present circumstances. Throughout my work, my intention has been to explore my social, personal and political 'beliefs' in order to create a body of paintings that both reflects and challenges my 'belief' structures. In my work there are contradictory desires for change and stability, and an ongoing struggle between location and dislocation.

Bibliography: leaves. 114-117. / In June this year I read an article entitled Eve's footprints safe in museum (Cape Times 24.6.98). The footprints had just been removed from the shore of the Langebaan lagoon. The footprints, imprinted in stone, have been dated to 117 000 years. The media use of the name Eve is an example of how theoretical possibility can become popular fact. The prints became exposed when the stone happened to crack and slide off along the strata that held the prints. Exposed to the elements and to a public who want to have their photograph taken standing where Eve once stood, the soft sandstone which held such a transient impression began to deteriorate rapidly. An article earlier in the year reported on the debate around the future of the prints. The geologist David Roberts, who discovered the prints, wanted them removed as soon as possible while Dr. Janette Deacon from the National Monuments Council was reported to have said, "We should rather see it preserved at the site as moving it would destroy a lot of its meaning. A museum display could never recreate the atmosphere of that scene" (Cape Times 14.1.98).

Concentrating on the object as vestige of function in the portrayal of muses in ancient Greek sculpture, my aim is to dismiss their traditional representations, and to reconstruct the choir of the muses by iconographic substitution. The hypothesis is that if the muses are prototypes rather than personages, then mythic meaning will survive its own dislocation and continue to function in substitute form, giving the resulting sculptures symbolic impetus.

The discourses of ritual, culture and ethics has, over the years, been a primarily ethnographic, philosophical and dramaturgical concern. Secrecy seems central in setting boundaries. Using ritual and culture as the common thread, I question the boundaries that are transgressed by contemporary South African artists in 'showing' and 'telling' things that are otherwise considered as secret. I discuss the ways in which my own practice as an artist and isangoma troubles the threshold. Considering the ideological function of the secret, my work examines the power relations implied in both keeping and divulging 'secrets'. This research poses the question: how does the performance or re-enactment of the secret elements of cultural and traditional practice in live, performance and installation art complicate cultural ethics? Through a discussion of my work, Imfihlo, as well as works by artists such as Nicholas Hlobo, Pieter Hugo, Churchill Madikida, Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke J van Veuren, I relate the role of secrecy in ideological structures with the trace. This concept exists throughout my research, whether it be in: forgotten histories; rituals and people (what the artist leaves behind); tracing space, or; by exploring the trace as an existential body, a trace of someone who once was, who exists in another realm, and many traces in one body.

Bibliography: pages 118-123. / In this project I examine curatorial processes and the experience of constructing and viewing museum exhibitions. Specifically I have been interested in the way in which certain exhibits facilitate powerful emotional responses from their viewers. I suggest that the curators of these kinds of exhibitions employ strategies which not only choreograph the displays but the viewers' bodies themselves as they move through them. As a case study of an experiential exhibition I focus on the District Six Museum where I have been part of its curatorial team since 1999. The work of curatorship that I have done at the Museum during the period of my registration for this degree constitutes part of this submission.