Scurvy

"Kevin Brand and I curated ‘Scurvy’ in 1995. The name refers to the blight that affected sailors rounding the tip of Africa and is also the South African slang for anything that is dirty, foul-looking or diseased. We hustled the keys to B Block within the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest standing colonial building in South Africa. The Castle was the symbolic centre of the apartheid Defence Force. We couldn’t believe our fortune in securing this site, redolent with a putrid history.

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We invited Lisa Brice, Barend de Wet, Andrew Putter, Kate Gottgens and Wayne Barker to join us to reflect on this historical narrative. Professor Neville Dubow, who taught us all at the University of Cape Town, described it as ‘an artful Trojan horse out of which seven iconoclasts have spilled to question and lampoon the whole colonising process, its hierarchies, its stereotypes, its icons, its sacred cows’."

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‍^BM