A PhD graduation

The CCA’s Nina Liebenberg graduated in July with a PhD in Fine Art titled “The Virus and the Vaccine: curatorship and the disciplinary outsider”.

Nina’s thesis examines the limitations of disciplinary knowledge and the resulting naturalisation of bias and convention within disciplines through the study of a Tabloid Medicine Chest donated to the university along with the Walter Floyd papers. The thesis demonstrates how the medicine chest has been rendered invisible because it exhibits characteristics that fall outside of those privileged by the library’s categorisation systems and search engines. Similar limiting forms of categorisation are then exposed in various collections throughout the university, demonstrating how disciplinary insiders curtail the explanatory power of their objects to expose social or political pressures brought to bear on their disciplines. The thesis then reveals the interdisciplinary potential of artmaking and curatorship in combating these limitations, contributing to thinking about the teaching of art and curatorship in a post-colonial world, as well as how disciplines (especially the sciences) can escape the hermetic enclosures they are often seen to occupy.