As a general rule, one should always avoid “survey” or “list” exhibitions. The Women's Quiliting Guild fundraising exhibition, the glib end-of-year student exhibition, the hobby art class showcase: these are all events which, generally, you ought to coordinate with medical appointments and visits with distant relatives. However, until October 16, an exception to the rule presents itself at the FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. The FADA Staff Exhibition, curated by Rory Bester, is not the mishmash exercise in box-ticking that it has been in previous years, and this is due in large part to Bester's careful methodology as a curator. Months before the exhibition he began to work with FADA staff members, all practicing artists and designers, to realise new works based on their existing interests and influences.

The artsists' brief was to idenitify and list twenty things that influence their working process and then to produce a work of art for the show that emerged out of this list. These lists, copies of which are available to viewers inside the gallery, make for entertaining reading. Architect Leon Krige provides a delectable list of fine wine and food pairings and David Paton lists twenty of his favourite destinations, which include Austria for its Winter Olympics ski slope and Holland for its pornography. Gordon Froud lists twenty similarities between Gordon Froud and Diane Victor. A difference: “I have a tolerance for academia and Diane has an abject intolerance and severe mistrust of academics.”

The exhibtition consists mostly of installation works, and the upper level of the gallery is populated by bright hoardes of found and made objects – books, second-hand knick-knacks, more books, ceramic mice. If you hear the rumble of traffic coming from down below, that's Alexander Opper's video installation The Nature of a Corner, which monitors the light changes over 24 hours in the most invisible corner of the FADA building, a noisy nook in a covered parking garage. By no accident, the corner in which it is displayed is the most visible corner of the building.