Imperfect Librarian

Diagram created by Andrew Putter to assist in plotting the casting requirements for his Fine Art Masters work, Native Life, for which he is re-staging the ethnographic photographs of Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin as a way of thinking about contemporary ideas of Africa and Europe in South African identity.

Several members of the Archive & Public Culture initiative will be participating in an exhibition at Michaelis Gallery next month exploring the various paths and practices that have led to their academic and personal interests in archival pursuits. Titled, Imperfect Librarian, the show will run from 12 to 26 March and feature the work of Joanne Bloch, Jessica Brown, Clare Butcher, Brenton Maart, George Mahashe, Andrew Putter and Jon Whidden.

The exhibition's evocative title comes from Jorge Luis Borges's The Library of Babel, written in 1941; a short, almost architectural story, in which the writer literally builds a (perhaps) infinite library/universe/archive. 'His words shape an intricate network of shelving, galleries, staircases and hexagons designed to hold a library containing "several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles",' reads the exhibition text.

'Over the last months, we artists and colleagues at the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA) have been engaging with the art of archive - realising that the story in history lies not only in the how but in the ways of its telling.'

A publication of associated materials from the CCA students will form part of the show and will be presented during the course of the exhibition run in March 2012.