This project ‘to curate the university’ was inspired to coincide with The University of Cape Town’s 175th anniversary. The curators wanted to represent the university in all its diversity, drawing together collections of objects housed within it. At the same time, and more importantly, the project sought to subject the process of collecting and exhibiting to scrutiny and to force collections of objects from different disciplines into dialogue with each other. In this way, the exhibition was less about the university’s history than about disciplinarity, classificatory systems and the spaces where disciplines can be encouraged to creatively intersect.
