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Through an analysis of my artistic work, I examine past and present representations of black women in South African public and private domains. Having been confronted with monuments erected to celebrate British colonialism and Afrikaner nationalism, I focus on the paucity of iconic black women in history and mythology. I perform figures who I construct from existing histories and look to the women in my own family archive to memorialise them. For this reason, performance has been key, in my practice, in re-locating the presence of the black female body. In South African architecture, monuments and public sculpture there is a lack of representation of black women. I refer to sites where statues and monuments have been erected to commemorate certain histories. Having experienced these spaces as particularly masculine and racialised, I perform women whom I consider to be significant. As a young black woman investigating current socio-political issues in South Africa, I draw parallels with the past. I embody these women in sculptural installations and in public spaces as living sculptures standing on a white plinth. In relation to these public performances, the exhibition includes sculptural installations that speak to the interplay of public and private domains. Animism and Ubuntu form part of the spiritual agency that is present in this work. Collectively these works narrate resistance and self-assertion in response to dominant ideologies in the public space.

In the various departments of a university, researchers, lecturers and students exercise limitations on the objects or subjects they study through the disciplinary categorisations and processes they apply. These methods, taught in the curricula of their undergraduate programmes, promote a particular way of looking and of understanding that privileges certain characteristics over others. As students become assimilated into their respective academic communities, they become naturalised to the resulting biases, habits, norms and conventions and, subsequently, are unaware of lurking blind spots. This process limits the kinds of knowledge these disciplinary ‘insiders' are exposed to, and I argue that it can lead to the occlusion of ethical considerations, hinder discovery and perpetuate negative aspects of the hegemonic Western foundations of many of these disciplines. To support these claims, I focus on an object housed in the University of Cape Town (UCT) library, a Tabloid medicine chest. This chest has been rendered invisible in the library because it exhibits characteristics that fall outside of those privileged by the library's categorisation systems and its search engines. By conducting an object-study that delivers a wide range of findings – most quite separate from the chest's original intended use – the object becomes a prompt and a provocation to examine where else in the institution knowledge has been rendered invisible by insiders and their methods. I survey objects and collections resident in the departments of the university and discuss two collections in detail: the M.R. Drennan anatomical collection, actively used in science curricula, and the Kirby collection of indigenous instruments, almost invisible in its host department. These case studies illustrate how limits imposed by their respective insiders curtail the explanatory power of objects, limiting an understanding of the social and political pressures brought to bear on a discipline and that shape its practice. The case studies, particularly of the Drennan collection, also illustrate that outsider perspectives can help expose disciplinary limitations. The next part of this enquiry considers the outsider perspective as championed by a particular form of curatorship and artmaking introduced by lecturers at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT in the 1990s. The exhibition making format and curatorial strategies introduced by these individuals are shown to be effective in revealing limitations placed on objects, in surfacing blind spots within the university and its affiliated museums and in opening up collections and their disciplines to outside perspectives. The effects of such exhibitions are traced as they reverberate in the university and culminate in the introduction of an interdisciplinary initiative focused on examining the university's knowledge archives, the instatement of an honours programme in curatorship and various departmental installations. Lastly, to elucidate what is at stake when an object is limited by the constraints of its host department and to showcase the potential of artmaking and curatorship in combating these limitations, the invisible chest in the library is subjected to a range of my own artmaking and curatorial strategies. This process is conceptualised as a shift from object-as-virus to object-as-vaccine. The methods I employ celebrate a much wider resonance of the object and extend the results revealed by the object-study at the start of this thesis.

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The practical component of this project comprises an installation of paintings exploring a narrative theme concerning the atmosphere (air, sky and space) in our future present. Alluding to Anthropogenic factors such as contamination, global warming, conflict, and neoliberal claims to the Commons of air and space, the premise of my project is speculative. [World] building on real life experiences that are rendered visually credible by the use of realist and photorealist painting techniques, the world that I create is familiar, partly autobiographic and recognisable, but centred around some unspecified catastrophe. Supporting the idea of a narrative still-in-progress, the painterly conceit of ‘non-finito' serves to undercut the visual certitudes of illusionism. Here the process of painting is visibly evident, rendering the works, or world they depict, as ‘in the making'. In support, the accompanying theoretical text: explores artists' creation of fictional/ imaginary worlds using landscapes and the role of science and speculative fiction; and traverses the visualisation of Anthropogenic concerns through landscapes, particularly in the use of skyscapes/ cloudscapes. Relative to the practical's presentation as an installation and execution as paintings, the text provides case studies of contemporary landscape painters who exploit the capacity of the conjunction of realism, photorealism and non-finito to convince viewers of their painted fictional and imaginary worlds while at the same time subverting such convictions. Mark Tansey's work, Action Painting II (1984) in particular, is examined in this regard. In the South African context, painters such as Luan Nel, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi, and MJ Lourens play with different visual registers to reflect the complexities of the future present. Others, such as Robyn Penn, raise real world Anthropogenic concerns by using diversely executed panels or installations of paintings. Penn's installations engage climate change through using the cloud as a major trope of uncertainty. ‘The sky is falling' thus attempts to reflect the unseen possibilities of visual narratives' engagement with ongoing global crises.

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Mambokadzi is built around the stories of my matrilineal histories and centred on the intimate space in which my grandmother, mother and I exist. It also seeks to recognize the collective space of Black womxn through an exploration of the royal ancestral spirit Nehanda who instigated the first Chimurenga (resistance-struggle) of 1896-97. This space is one tainted by colonial and patriarchal trauma, yet concurrently subverts colonial ideas of gender, particularly the feminine. Mambokadzi is intended to embody a decolonial idea of gender and femininity. In this collective space, womxn have consciously and unconsciously cultivated power within the confines of patriarchy, masculinity and coloniality. Through sculpture, I interrogate learned perceptions about gender and reflect on experiences of womxn in my family as a way to discuss womxnhood in Southern Africa and the diaspora broadly