A633

2013

Third-year exhibition at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town

A633 presents an anthology of fragments, an inexact archive of domestic debris. The assortment of personalia exhibited reveals both the anxiety of the archival process and the tensions between fact and fiction, the authentic and its copies. The works included engage with the archive’s ineluctable flaws, for the archive, in its partial totality, can never be closed or concluded, remains always a project incomplete. Thus, as imperfect evidence, the fragments presented in this exhibition cannot be precisely reassembled. The images of a whole (of a home) constituted are necessarily false – echoing rather than reflecting the original. The archival project is further undermined by the ambiguity of the objects it includes. Some objects presented directly describe evidence in photographs, replicas and text, and some are the evidence itself, both gesturing towards a home and the objects – the lives – it contains. A tension between the authentic object and its fabrication, its uncanny double, is presented, and with it, the construction of multiple fictions and narratives strung together by this categorical confusion.

Untitled (Rooster), 2013, found object and hand-sculpted clay and enamel facsimile

Untitled (Utopia), 2013, found object and hand-bound digital facsimile printed on newsprint

Untitled (Clothing Horse), 2013, pine and steel