In considering the Baholo art collection as a feature of the evolving cultural topography on campus, it is useful to consider the artworks from a few key perspectives.
Absence: Being, artwork and society
The concept of absence is inextricably linked to that of presence; and, indeed, for something to be viewed as ‘absent’ it is necessary for it to have had some prior form of agency or presence. The term may therefore be said to mark a state change, i.e. from being ‘present’ to being ‘absent’. In considering these two concepts in relation to art, artist and artwork we start to deal with the question of being-in-the-world, or how the nature of being manifests through absence / presence as a mode of representation.
Following Heidegger’s discussion in his essay titled “The Origin of the Work of Art” (2006), we may say that the act of creating an artwork imbues the work with something additional to merely combining the materials to form a composite. The workliness of the work is necessarily connected to the role of the artist in the production of the artwork such that the work so created acquires a form of presence-in-the-world that can afterward be recognised as its essential meaning above the materiality, or thingliness, of its substance.
This form of the artwork’s presence-in-the-world differs from ordinary objects in that it establishes a relationship between what it represents and what it is (i.e. It has a mimetic function) to the extent that we may discern a discomforting disjunction. In seeking to represent an aspect of the world, it can do so only by not being as such – that is to say, by presenting an absence in place of the presence it seeks to represent. The more powerful and effective its portrayal, ironically, the more powerfully the disjunction is felt, even at the very moment of its apotheosis.
Curating the Absence 