This exhibition was a retrospective of the activities and artworks that constitute The Portable Hawkers Museum, made between February 2003 and February 2005. Within this body of work, it was my intention to hold aspects of museological discourse up for a particular kind of looking through foregrounding the processes of looking within the gallery. The exhibition was divided into two rooms, and the two parts of the exhibition were linked with the use of surveillance technology. In the first room, viewers were presented with various kinds of documentary material, (labeled as such), of the past activities of The Portable Hawkers Museum, as well as representations of the objects belonging to The Portable Hawkers Museum. The second part of the exhibition included re-presentations of The Taxonomy of The Portable Hawkers Museum and Authentic Reproductions. These artworks were displayed in vitrenes, borrowed from The Johannesburg Art Gallery. The installation parodies displays within natural history museums. The method of display, as well as the choice of objects on display challenge systems of value within the institutions of art, and the ways in which those values are communicated to the viewer. Viewers were monitored by surveillance cameras, while looking at the objects in the vitrenes. The surveillance footage was on display in the first room of the exhibition. Through this display, viewers in the first room could watch other viewers looking at the second part of the exhibition.
