The Medicine Chest

Items

• 

  Buttons

  A display of a collection of pins, buckles and buttons excavated from the washing pools used by slaves on Table Mountain. Taken from their dusty boxes in storage they are currently exhibited as part of Skotnes's 'Division of the World' (Department of Archaeology).
• 

  Division of the World

  "Undergraduate students regularly engage in discussions around certain displays as part of their teaching programme (N. Zachariou, personal communication, 27 May 2020), and the installation is also used to introduce visitors (exchange students and school children, for example) or students from other UCT departments (architecture students taking the archaeology module) to the department and the discipline (J. Parkington, personal communication, 20 June 2020). It has even been described as a ‘super curriculum’ (or as ‘several super curriculums’) for how it visualises what archaeology does on both an empirical and procedural level (J. Parkington, personal communication, 20 June 2020)" (Liebenberg 2021: 210).
• 

  Page 79 of the Curiosity CLXXV catalogue.

  "Created by Felix von Luschan, an Austrian doctor, anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and ethnographer in the early 20th century, the chart, known as the Von Luschan chromatic scale (...) was used to classify skin colour and featured as a tool in race studies and anthropometry of the time. Forgotten by its current department staff and students, its presence draws attention to the role of medicine and science in the apartheid agenda and to the larger racist scientific practices of measuring and classifying human physical differences in the 19th and 20th centuries to produce a ‘typology of race’ (Sturken & Cartwright 2018: 351–352). To support such theories, object collections in scientific university departments worldwide also featured collections of human remains; tools for measuring the size and shape of skulls; and charts detailing various physiognomic features (Sturken & Cartwright 2018: 351 – 352)" (Liebenberg 2021: 122 - 125).
• 

  Stone tools

  "By positioning artefacts to emphasise their labelling (stones are positioned to reveal the details written on them), including seemingly familiar objects and expanding and shrinking timelines, the installation [Division of the World] draws attention to the framing devices, tools and methods of the department’s insiders" (Liebenberg 2021: 207).
• 

  A display on page 97 of the Curiosity CLXXV catalogue

  "A stainless-steel dilator from the Drennan collection, a carded set of glass slides of xenopus heart sections from the Medical Microbiology collection, a 19th century game called 'Frogs and Toads' from Special Collections and a wax model of an embryo, also from Drennan. This ‘amphibian’-inspired display showcases many qualities of the curatorial method, such as visual quotation (the combination of these materials foregrounds that the shape of the dilator resembles a frog), analogy (the wax embryo, dilator and frogs allude to the resemblance between sperm and tadpoles) and juxtaposition (the frog as a scientific topic dissected and contained in the slides, and the frog as a board piece in a game played by children)" (Liebenberg 2021: 183).
• 

  Untitled

  A pencil was completely shaved by a pencil sharpener into one long continuous spiral.
• 

  The Northern Lights

  Histology slides of the brain (human and animal), scanned and converted into video projection
• 

  Einstein's abstracts

  Cibachrome on aluminium. Microscopic magnification of Einstein’s equations from a blackboard that had been preserved in the History of Science Museum in Oxford
• 

  Heart of Cape Town Museum

  Christiaan Barnard did forty-eight trial transplants with dogs before he undertook such an operation with a human being.
• 

  Bird Mark 7 Respirator

  Dr. Bird invented a number of popular medical devices that were used to care for patients with breathing problems. During WWII he served in the Army Air Corps where, in addition to training and transport assignments, he studied aircraft and respiratory and cardiovascular problems at high altitude. Two devices that he produced during the war went into the design of his first commercial ventilator, the Mark 7 Respirator. Dr. Bird’s respirators and anesthesia ventilators have been used during many of the first human surgical procedures. Among these were the first open heart procedure and the first liver transplant.
• 

  Touching both walls at the same time

  As a young sculptor working in the 1960s, Horn suffered severe lung damage from working with fiberglass and polyester, and spent long periods convalescing in hospital. Whilst restricted to her hospital bed, Horn devised a series of wearable sculptures or 'body extensions' which she would later make using cloth, wood, bandages, belts, feathers, and found objects. Her masks and extensions contain, constrain, and/or elongate the bodies of their wearers.
• 

  Touching both walls at the same time

  As a young sculptor working in the 1960s, Horn suffered severe lung damage from working with fiberglass and polyester, and spent long periods convalescing in hospital. Whilst restricted to her hospital bed, Horn devised a series of wearable sculptures or 'body extensions' which she would later make using cloth, wood, bandages, belts, feathers, and found objects. Her masks and extensions contain, constrain, and/or elongate the bodies of their wearers.