From the Vault exhumes archives and engages with buried museum collections as a critical resource to contextualise and map contemporary society and culture. It concerns itself with exhuming work that has long gathered dust in museum memory, bringing these works to the surface as an unravelling of history, an undoing of narratives.

The exhibition represents a critical engagement with time by browsing through historical acquisitions, examining their significance as fragments of the past and showing how museum vaults can be a compass for the future. From the Vault is a looking back, a narrative alignment in service to our imagination and a way to work with memory as a future possibility.

This inaugural exhibition examines the university art collections from Stellenbosch University and the University of Fort Hare, forms part of the education programme and will focus on history of art and art as a mirror to society.