This exhibition was made up of artworks that belong to the Wits Art Museum collection. Each artwork was carefully chosen because the artists used objects that they did not make themselves in their artworks. We refer to these features as ‘found objects’. A found object may be a whole or a fragment. A ‘readymade’ is one type of found object. The term was first used by the French artist Marcel Duchamp to refer to artworks that were made from found objects that he did not change very much, as a way of challenging Western ideas about what counted as art. 

While Duchamp may have been the first artist to use the term readymade, he was certainly not the first, or the last artist to use found objects to make art. There is a need to move beyond the restrictive understanding of the use of found objects as anti-art gestures. The use of found objects is part of a long global history of art making. To use found objects in artworks is a way to construct new meanings for objects. In bringing associations from the everyday into the field of art, found objects also influence the meaning of the artworks they are embedded in. 

The exhibition explored the use of found objects as an artistic tool.  The exhibition considered how the importance of an object can change over time, examined the changing relationship of art to everyday life, and questioned how the meanings that are attached to objects affect our understanding of the artworks in which they are embedded.