SELECTED WORK

1. Experiments in Unconserving

Experiments in Unconserving
Research paper & exhibition
Michaelis Galleries
2021

Experiments in Unconserving engages with Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid-era art, exploring ways to undo the care lavished upon historically violent and complex collections. It focuses on Cabinet and Deputy Ministers, a painting that forms part of the South African Parliament’s permanent art collection and was housed in the paintings storeroom below the National Assembly.

Cabinet and Deputy Ministers depicts the ministers and deputy ministers of the South African government at the time that the 1961 Constitution was commenced. Art celebrating Afrikaner nationalist ideology helped create a distinct Afrikaner identity and normalised apartheid, in line with the goals of the National Party. Cabinet and Deputy Ministers can thus be viewed as an emblem of coloniality.

Conservation, as an act of care, allows for the maintenance of an archive. Condition reports for Parliament’s colonial and apartheid paintings show the care that has been layered upon Cabinet and Deputy Ministers since its removal from the walls of Parliament. The conservation of this work implies that it is more deserving of care than the people it marginalises.

Conducting experiments in unconserving Cabinet and Deputy Ministers challenges the broader set of ideas that has upheld coloniality in the arts and questions whether colonial and apartheid artworks are deserving of care. The exhibition comprises archival documents, prints of Cabinet and Deputy Ministers on which conservation issues have been recreated, a participatory gesture that allows audiences to intervene in copies of the painting, and a short documentary film.

2. Ons vir jou

Ons vir jou
Lily van Rensburg & Haroon Gunn-Salie
Giclée print on cotton rag
90 x 126 cm (framed)
1/6 + 2 AP
2025

Ons vir jou, a photographic artwork by Lily van Rensburg and Haroon Gunn-Salie, provides a visual record of the proceedings that occur at the Voortrekker Monument on the 16th of December each year. The 16th of December, reframed as Reconciliation Day during South Africa’s dawn of democracy, was celebrated as the Day of the Covenant and marked the anniversary of the 1838 Battle of Blood River. ‘Ons vir jou’ portrays the crowd gathered in 2024 to witness the moment at which, at noon, a beam of sunlight penetrates the oculus in the Monument’s domed roof to illuminate a marble cenotaph 40 meters below. With the inscription “Ons vir jou, Suid Afrika” etched into its surface, the cenotaph is today symbolic of the grave in which Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid are laid to rest.

Ons vir jou formed part of the group exhibition A Beast with Two Backs, curated by Keely Shinners and Grace Matetoa at the Association for Visual Arts.

3. Portrait photography

4. This is a love letter to 5A Myrtle Street, Oranjezicht, 8001

This is a love letter to 5A Myrtle Street, Oranjezicht, 8001
Extract from object biography
2025

Artists have communed for centuries, be it in art colonies in 1960s America, the “yellow house” of Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, or Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s shared room in the Chelsea Hotel. Arising from each of these locations was the building of community, collective taking of responsibility, and trajectories of collaborative practice. Collective living, its success reliant on the negotiation of space and inter-personal relationships, requires one to function as part of an artist collective. Like artist collectives, communal houses are bound to disband. At 5A Myrtle Street, we were all, to varying degrees, artists.

I’ve lived in three pink houses: the first, my mother’s home; in the second, Simcha, I lasted only a month; and at Myrtle Street, the third, I surfaced as myself. Usually, when I think of Myrtle Street, I cry. Now, I think I’d like to. Upon my departure, I wrote a poem, poorly:

To grow so knowing, in a house,

your house,

that you recount the seconds, in which you

turn around

and close the front door,

just before it slams.

This is a love letter to 5A Myrtle Street, Oranjezicht, 8001.

Sherry Turkle, in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, describes objects as provocations to thought and companions to our emotional lives (Turkle, 2007: 5). 5A Myrtle Street constituted such a companion, its multiple and fluid life roles changing as it journeyed through time (Turkle, 2007: 6). To leave Myrtle Street is to yearn to return it to the role it once occupied, its exterior walls a container for our traumas, aspirations, things made, and thoughts shared – where even the simple act of washing dishes, of taking turns buying Sunlight liquid, amounted to collaborative practice. Often, we would engage in creative acts together – Chris and Nathan DJing at Evol, Amber and I sharing meals, each of us contributing a drawing to hang on the wall, or planting a garden on the balcony. The artist collective MADEYOULOOK engaged gardening as a means to think through South Africa’s colonial inheritance – particularly in relation to the black South Africans’ reimagining of the urban garden (MADEYOULOOK, 2018). While the garden at Myrtle Street, comprising discarded pot plants and dahlia tubers in a wheelbarrow, was not a decolonial event, it did constitute a radical act of love – of making something from almost nothing.

A bookshelf I had salvaged from the parking lot of the Gardens Centre housed our books until Amber bought our neighbour Doreen’s glass cabinet from her estate sale. Carved from cherry wood and adorned with gold insignia, it served an aesthetic rather than a functional purpose – its shelves soon buckling under the weight of our books, the instigators of our thoughts and conversations propped up on broken glass. The bookshelf and its associated fragility, much like the kitchen cabinets or the walls themselves, constituted an archive of phrases resonated with, poems read to lovers, of a bowl of keys, and stolen lighters. Achille Mbembe begins The Power of the Archive and Its Limits by suggesting that a definition of ‘archives’ cannot exist without encompassing both documents and the building in which they are stored (Mbembe, 2002: 19). With its status deriving from this entanglement, it was the potency of place, together with our memorabilia, from which this archive emerged. While physically dispersed – the bookshelf in Amber’s new flat, Nathan a custodian of our hand-made Christmas decorations – the digital detritus thereof remains, including an inactive Instagram account by the name of @ourhousemyrtle, a Google alert each Sunday denoting who is to clean what, and tweets as mundane as “Two years of Myrtle Street today. God bless the home we’ve built with (and for) each other (and ourselves)” or “How nice to read an old to-do list: get job, find rent money; and then a more recent one: buy new bedding, source 1000 earthworms.”

Bricolage, as proposed by Claude Levi-Strauss, refers to the combining and recombining of a closed set of materials to make way for the formation of new ideas (Levi-Strauss via Turkle, 2007: 4). At Myrtle Street, we repositioned the furniture on a monthly basis so as to avoid intellectual stagnancy. The artworks we coalesced, as diverse as a period oil painting salvaged years earlier from the Hout Bay dump, a semi-valuable poster of the Rosetta Stone, or an original Japanese woodblock, were hung, removed, and rehung. Never permanently in place, but always at home, they echoed our own existences. Arjun Appadurai, in The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective, argues that commodities, like people, have social lives (Appadurai, 1986: 3). With little money to decorate the house anew, we trawled second-hand shops – Nazareth House in Vredehoek, Help the Rural Child on Adderley Street, the stalls of informal traders on St Georges Mall. With every object having lived a life before entering our house, Myrtle Street became a bricolage of the social lives of objects.

In The Philosophy of Money, George Simmel posits that the value of an object is not determined by its material worth, but informed by the judgements of the subjects who interact with it (Simmel via Appadurai, 1986: 3). The value of our seemingly worthless objects was not only determined by us, but by the relationship between the object and that which was positioned alongside it. Elena Filipovic asserts in What is an Exhibition? that an exhibition is comprised of the relationships facilitated between artworks and the discourses in which they are framed (Filipovic, 2013: 9). Myrtle Street, to an extent, functioned like an exhibition, its co-curators having positioned a collaged poster of Fela Kuti next to a Polish portrait of the Virgin Mary – this to allude to legacy, inheritance, and spiritual guidance of various forms. Beside the front door, Amber’s name had been applied to the wall in red vinyl. Brought home by Chris during their time working for a packaging company, it remains in place, as if the exhibition’s deinstallation was never completed.

During the day, the sea is visible from the balcony and at night, the harbour. In Peter Clarke’s Plain Furniture, there are poems titled Bed, Bookshelf, Cutlery Holder, and Small Bench (Clarke, 1991). I could write the same of Myrtle Street, its mundanity being that which made it beautiful. Myrtle Street was an exhibition of the paracuratorial kind – a constellation of objects, a talks programme, and a research project at once (Sheikh, 2017). This is a love letter to 5A Myrtle Street, Oranjezicht, 8001, where sugar soap could erase everything – sugar soap and a sorry. My youth is embalmed in a building, and its address is 5A Myrtle Street, Oranjezicht, 8001.

Bibliography:
Appadurai, A. 1986. Commodities and the politics of value. In The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–62.
Clarke, P. 1991. Plain Furniture. Cape Town: Snailpress.
Filipovic, E. 2013. What is an Exhibition? In Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating. J Hoffman, Ed. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 3–28.
MADEYOULOOK, 2018. Ejaradini. Available: https://www.made-you-look.net/
ejaradini-1.
Mbembe, A. 2002. The Power of the Archive and Its Limits. In Refiguring the Archive. C. Hamilton, V. Harris, M. Pickover, G. Reid, R. Saleh & J. Taylor, Eds. Dordrecht: Springer. 19–27.
Sheikh, S. 2017. From Para to Post: The Rise and Fall of Curatorial Reason. In Springerin XXIII (1, 2017). 16–20.
Turkle, S. 2007. The Things That Matter. In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 3–10.
Wainana, B. 2011. One Day I Will Write About This Place. London: Granta Books.

5. Portrait & landscape photography

6. The Domino Effect

The Domino Effect – An imagined fall of Cape Town’s colonial monuments
Set of 28 printed dominoes
2021(reworked in 2024 for the exhibition From root–route: meditations on migration by the Open University Network & Department of Curatorial, Visual and Public Cultures at Wits University)

“The game of domino... is a very widespread transcultural point of production. Based on games of Chinese dice, it was then taken to Italy, from where it spread to the New World with the Spanish and Portuguese colonisations, becoming very popular in Latin America. From a historical viewpoint, it reflects the migratory route of the game from Cathay to the Caribbean, passing through the European routes of early capitalism; it is a map of the historical process that led to the modern world. Furthermore, the domino effect refers to the chain of historical and argumental moments that define the links between colonisation, post-colonialism and capitalist globalisation” – Cuauhtémoc Medina, vía Iván Muñiz-Reed.

The Domino Effect – An imagined fall of Cape Town’s colonial monuments presents a map of central Cape Town's colonial statues, artworks, and road signs as a set of dominoes. While colonial rule has ended, its physical remnants remain ever-present in the public spaces of Cape Town. These physical remnants, or monuments celebrating the likes of Cecil John Rhodes, act as impositions of colonial and apartheid ideology and erode the sense of belonging of people of colour in the city. Protest movements such as Rhodes Must Fall have become increasingly valuable in creating a heritage landscape that is representative of all South Africans. The removal of the Cecil John Rhodes monument at the University of Cape Town, however, should have triggered a domino effect, with other colonial monuments across the city being toppled or removed, one after the other.

7. Journal excerpts & drawings

8. Decay as metaphor

Decay as metaphor
Exhibition & publication
The Point of Order
2024

Decay as metaphor offers a contemplation of the deterioration of Johannesburg’s public artworks commissioned in the lead-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The decaying artworks, including Fire Walker by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx and Invented Mythologies by Doung Anwar Jahangeer, among others, become emblematic of the city’s collapsing infrastructure, a tiring of the workforce, the corrosion of the creative sector, and the disillusionment of its citizens with the notion of a rainbow nation. A constellation of ideas and objects encompassing a publication, print artworks, installation, and performance and video art, Decay as metaphor presents a para-curatorial response that aims to reactivate the site of each artwork as an archive of personal and public memory.

9. Bees in Amber

On Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse
Extract from object biography
2021

Bees in Amber lies in a crate of 13 books, all muddled and disaster-struck. It is smaller than the others and isn’t bound in leather. Peeking out from underneath a 1738 publication of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, it appears timid and alone, unsuspecting – a little lost.

The crate containing Bees in Amber sits at DK Conservators in Wynberg, in an adaptable room that accommodates whichever task is deemed most pressing. The walls are painted a 70s brown, and the overhead lights cast an eerie glow over its contents. The large table in the centre is piled with books in varying degrees of deterioration, and walking through the door, curtained with a thick sheet of plastic, is like entering a morgue. A make-shift photographic studio has been set up alongside a pile of forms to document damage. As I write this, I refer to a page titled “CONSERVATION REPORT”, with my name listed below staff member. I have answered the question “Is damage evident on the following parts of the book?” by drawing ticks next to labels that denote the book’s anatomy. Bees in Amber has many “yes” ticks, as if it's in urgent need of hospitalisation or treatment for a disease.

Bees in Amber measures 16 by 10 cm, and is 2.5 cm high when lying flat. It is made of one-quarter cloth and three-quarters paper. Its title and the author's name, John Oxenham, are stamped into the earthy brown paper in a font resembling Art Deco cinema signage. The cloth, while cream linen, is streaked with uncharacteristic pinks and greens (shades that would, for instance, appear if one’s inkjet printer were malfunctioning). The front and back boards are crinkled and warped, and the front-right corner shows signs of severe wear, with the paper folded to form a dog-ear. Although this stems from years of use, a dog-ear is often created by a reader to mark a phrase or chapter that holds personal meaning. It is as if nature itself has marked this book for its subtle significance.

Mould spores cling to the front and back boards, creating an effect reminiscent of marbled post office paper. Circular rust marks and denim blue vinyl have attached themselves to the linen of the back board, likely transferred from the front cover of a different book, like a tattoo symbolising friendship. When one opens the front cover of Bees in Amber, the mull (a gauzy material that mimics a bandage) is exposed where the glue connecting it to the spine has degraded. While this hinge is broken, the outer joint – that small groove running vertically between the book cover and the spine – remains intact. The hinge’s breaking has revealed the raised cord that bound the book. Raised cord, the most popular binding method until the mid-18th century, is a form of sewing in which the thread runs up and down each section of the book, and then around the sewing supports.

On either side of the exposed binding are the pastedown and flyleaf, or the first two pages after one lifts the front cover. Herein lie the most whimsical parts of Bees in Amber – printed on the pastedown are 6 ink drawings of minute bees. These are tender, with sensitive markings – the bees’ wings stippled and translucent. Light appears to reflect off their backs, and their pincers are outstretched, as though they are preparing to perch upon flowers come springtime. The paper is an aged yellow, but was the colour of amber at the time of print. The yellow has bled into indescribable shades of blue and brown, a muted rainbow of sorts.

While the book block of Bees in Amber bears minimal damage in comparison to the front and back boards, there are signs of water damage along the edges of the outer pages. The pages have deckled edges – ragged right margins characteristic of handmade rather than machine-trimmed paper. These pages also show signs of foxing – those rust-coloured spots resulting from the oxidation of organic and inorganic impurities left behind from the paper-making process. While foxing is a naturally occurring process common to most old books, conservators can easily reduce its visibility through washing and bleaching. If the pages of Bees in Amber are to be washed and bleached, they will need to be re-stained with tea to match their original colour. It is a funny thing to take the age out of something and then put it back.

Holding the book (it fits neatly into the palms of my hands), I wonder when it was last opened – when last the bees trapped in amber came up for air or saw the light of day. I am drawn to bees as I am drawn to flowers, and bees and flowers have a shared existence, much like the relationship between reader and book. For one feels connected to the words and worlds that they contain, and to the materiality of the pages between one’s fingers.

Bees in Amber was published in 1913 by Methuen & Co (now Methuen Publishers) at 36 Essex Street, London, and printed at Garden City Press Limited in Letchworth. Its shelf number is pencilled into the flyleaf as “BDK 13 OXEN 60/3827”. The ‘Search and Find’ function of the University of Cape Town’s Primo digital library system decodes that the shelves labelled “BDK” contain the Kipling Collection, with the source record revealing that John Oxenham’s poem “No East or West” on page 45 makes reference to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ballad of East and West.” Rudyard Kipling was a racist, a misogynist, and a staunch supporter of the British Colonial Empire. His poem “The White Man’s Burden” is often cited as the paragon of his dubious political alignments. Hedley Twidle makes note of Kipling’s unwavering support of Cecil John Rhodes, stating that Kipling, when writing of Rhodes, would refer to him as “Him”, effectively placing Rhodes in the tier of divinity and casting him as a god-like figure (Twidle, 2012: 86).

Although expansive, the University of Cape Town’s Kipling Collection is rarely utilised by its student body, which has little use for poetic racism. But perhaps it is worth questioning whether a collection ought to be recognised as a sum of its parts, for when colonial or violent collections are deconstructed, and parts combined with those of other collections, new understandings of colonial histories can emerge. This is not, however, a call for the continued conservation and circulation of colonial material, but rather to illustrate that the canons of existing collections can (and should) be subverted to stimulate dialectical relationships between past conservatisms and current institutional critique.

Arjun Appadurai further argues that commodities, like people, have social lives (Appadurai, 1986: 3). Bees in Amber’s crate number, pencilled into the flyleaf above its shelf number, provides evidence of this. In the aftermath of the fire that raged through the University of Cape Town’s Jagger Library, the crate number 3.12.2.0 facilitated the travel of Bees in Amber from the basement of UCT Libraries to a refrigerated shipping container, where wet books wrapped in clingfilm were stacked one on top of the other like cuts of meat. After being transported to DK Conservators, Bees in Amber was unwrapped, placed on its plastic packaging with its crate number attached, and stood out to dry. This drying, with dehumidifiers and heaters, caused the distortion of the front and back boards and the crinkling so recognisable in books that have changed form over too short a period. Hereafter, the crate number was transferred from the plastic wrapping to the flyleaf in 2B pencil. Bees in Amber remains in the room of requirements, checked off on an inventory list, and resting in a crate of 13 books.

It is Wednesday, the 26th of April at 3:35 pm, and I am standing in the belly of the beast – the burnt-out drum of the University of Cape Town’s Jagger Library. The dehumidifiers hum as they suck the moisture out of the basement one, two, three floors below. I stand on the burnt crisps of books, their pages cling to the bottom of my shoes – a soggy, ashy mess that I will trample into the bricks of the plaza. To the south are the remnants of atlases, their different-coloured lines barely visible through the soot. To the west are dictionaries, and to the east is an area I cannot enter due to structural instability. The smell of burnt paper, of burnt wood, emanates from the wreckage. A site worker explains that plaster expands when exposed to high temperatures, causing it to crack and fall away from the walls. The pillars have been stripped bare, exposing the layers of paint applied through the ages. They are cream and dusty pink, against the red of the unveiled brickwork. When I look up, I can see the sky – a flight of swallows swooping past and observing the ruins from above.

I think of Achille Mbembe’s The Power of the Archive and Its Limits, to his statement of “There cannot be a definition of ‘archives’ that does not encompass both the building itself and the documents stored there” (Mbembe, 2002: 19). I consider what has survived this fire: books without a home, and documents without a building. Not the first editions of Don Quixote, but books like Bees in Amber, timid and alone. It has begun snowing – the ashes of the million books float in the breeze and settle in my hair, on my face, at my feet. And the infrastructure, this shell of a broken library, stands serene – like a phoenix, it is rising from the ashes.

Bibliography:
Appadurai, A. 1986. The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Mbembe, A. 2002. The Power of the Archive and Its Limits. In Refiguring the Archive. C. Hamilton, V. Harris, M. Pickover, G. Reid, R. Saleh & J. Taylor, Eds. Dordrecht: Springer. 19-27.
Oxenham, J. 1913. Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse. London: Methuen.
Twidle, H. 2012. ‘All Like and Yet Unlike the Old Country:’ Kipling in Cape Town, 1891–1908 — A Reappraisal. In English in Africa, 39 (2). 85–109.

10. Event photography