Status: Draft No. 5, November 2024. To be presented to the UCT Senate for consideration.

Aims

– Extract from Draft 5: UCT Works of Art Collection Curatorial Policy

The WOA Committee (WOAC) Terms of Reference mandate the WOAC to ‘promote the display of the collection through engaged curation’ and to ‘contribute to an inclusive heritage expression for the University’. This Curatorial Policy sets out the parameters of how to achieve this.

The UCT WOA Collection Curatorial Policy lays out principles intended to ensure that the UCT WOA Collection is used for: supporting and enhancing the University of Cape Town’s Vision and Mission, and specifically Vision 2030, contributing to transformation, creating a culture of inclusivity at the university, and the use of the collection and its resources for education, research, conservation, preservation, and or exhibition purposes in a sustainable manner.

The UCT Vision 2030 document states of UCT that “transformation and social engagement were regarded as the cross-cutting elements of our ethos; they must be present in all strategic choices at all levels in order to be effective" (UCT Vision 2030, p5). This document thus sets out how the UCT WOA Collection should be curated to ensure that these cross-cutting elements of the UCT ethos are present.

The UCT WOA Collection Curatorial Policy guides curators, WOAC members and stakeholders in the curatorial choices made around the use of objects in the collection, curatorial choices around conceptual, immaterial works or activist interventions in the UCT WOA Collection, as well as curatorial choices around artwork or projects that are incorporated into the WOA programme without drawing on or being accessioned into the UCT WOA Collection.

The WOAC aims to include as many voices as possible and hence to engage with and commission curators, artist, performers, writers and other creatives to propose, produce and co-produce projects with and for the UCT WOA Collection. This policy guides individual students, staff, stakeholders or collectives that want to work with WOAC.

The policy also guides the WOAC in its response to and responsibility for artworks on the University of Cape Town campuses that were produced, displayed, bought or commissioned without WOAC input, whether through a formal process of acquisition and curation, or through activist interventions.

By writing and making available this policy the Committee overseeing the UCT WOA Collection hopes to make its curatorial processes transparent for university students, staff and stakeholders, artists, audiences and collaborators. In this, the policy acknowledges that the workings of WOAC have been largely re-active, and this policy and the making available of it should be seen as a desire by WOAC to be proactive.

View full document Draft 5: UCT Works of Art Collection Curatorial Policy