The day Wits museum took art to the cleaners
’Invisible’ staff get a chance to add personal touch to a new exhibition of African works, writes
SWEEP OF HISTORY: For Vuyiswa Ngesman, a broom reminded her of childhood duties
IN the storeroom upstairs at the Wits Art Museum, a few objects from the museum’s collection of 11 000 art works sit on a table in dim light. A few fighting sticks, some bowls, beadwork, a straw broom.
These are part of the collection’s African art archive chosen by the 17 members of staff for an upcoming exhibition, From the Heart: Personal Perspectives on the WAM Collection.
By this week these will be installed in the museum’s basement exhibition space complete with quotes from the staff about how and why they chose the objects in what is an interesting approach to the selection process that seeks to provide a more personal take on African art.
Vuyiswa Ngesman, a museum’s visitor services coordinator, noticed many foreign visitors seemed not too happy about the predominance of exhibitions by contemporary artists and wanted to know where the museum’s legendary collection of more traditional African art was hiding.
So when a space opened in the museum’s programme, she suggested that something be done with the African collection.
What the museum’s team came up with was the idea that everybody who worked in the space, from the curators to the security guards and cleaners, be allowed to choose objects that meant something to them.
For cleaner Danisile Mkhize, who has worked at WAM since 2012, “it was nice to be included because most of the time we’re excluded from so many things because we’re cleaners”.
While she had seen many of the objects in the course of her work, she’d never thought about them as particularly special. In the storeroom her eye was drawn to a drum and a decorated hyena skin. The skin “reminded me of something that my grandfather used to have”, she says.
“It’s a traditional thing. He was a herbalist and he used to have a skin on the wall where he used to consult with the ancestors. They believed it was there for protection and to chase away evil spirits. I didn’t think of it as an art work; it was something used for traditional purposes.”
Research associate Same Mdluli, who facilitated the selection process, says she’s not sure whether a similar exhibition has been mounted in museums elsewhere. The idea was “to pose questions about what this thing called African art means . . . especially for staff members who don’t have the opportunity to work with the objects in a curatorial sense but are familiar with them”.
Mkhize describes the experience as “exciting to be part of something you never thought you would”.
She says: “The thing I’ve learnt is that people have very different perspectives towards art works and so we can all have different impressions of African art.
“It’s about how you see it as an individual and they shouldn’t exclude anyone because art is for everybody.”
The inclusiveness of BEAT GOES ON: Cleaner Danisile Mkhize chose a drum to be part of her story the exhibition echoes developments within the broader university — the #FeesMustFall protests and student opposition to outsourcing.
For Mdluli it’s important “because it’s a public museum, it needs to become a forum for certain debates. What better way to do that than through culture and looking at how people see themselves in relation to other people?”
Patrick Dlamini, one of the guards, chose a pair of earlobe plugs. In his explanation, included in the catalogue that will accompany the exhibition, he describes how he was told to remove the plugs when he started working there because these were not part of the uniform.
However, for Dlamini, a member of the Shembe church, plugs are part of his identity and spirituality, representing a way of blocking out the noise of the outside world but also bringing him closer to the voices of his ancestors.
Today he wears a smaller pair while patrolling the main exhibition space downstairs.
The process was recorded and videos and testimonies from the staff will accompany the objects when the exhibition is installed. The labels for the works will also include quotes from the people who chose them, going against the coldly objective conventions of museum practice to emphasise the personal relationships at the heart of the project.
For Ngesman, who chose a large straw broom with Ndebele decorations on its handle, the selection process was guided by what she remembered from her childhood in North West.
The broom “reminded me of the sweeping I had to do when I grew up and had to clean the homestead before 5am”, she says.
“The fact that it’s Ndebele meant nothing to me because a lot of the objects cross cultures and we all use them in the same way.”
While she often uses her personal experiences for talks during tours by visitors, this exhibition is somewhat different because “I feel like I have a voice and I can represent my people”, she says.
“Literature is there, research is there, but the uniqueness of the story has to come from the owner of the object, so this exhibition gives us a chance to tell that unique story. There’s no longer a broken telephone kind of message.”
From the Heart: Personal Perspectives on the WAM Collection opens at 6pm on Tuesday and runs until July 17 at the Wits Art Museum in Braamfontein