After the Thrill is Gone: Fashion, Politics and Culture in Contemporary South African Art

After the Thrill is Gone: Fashion, Politics and Culture in Contemporary South African Art features fourteen artists who read the political climate of post-apartheid South Africa through fashion’s embrace of the “new.”

Signaling an end to race-based legislation and the often violent, discriminatory practices of apartheid and its colonial antecedents, Nelson Mandela’s victory in the 1994 elections marked the transition toward a new South Africa.

Similar to the use of quotation and repetition in fashion—modes endlessly reiterated each season—South Africa’s continued legacies of dispossession and inequality render the present day country insubstantially different from its apartheid predecessor. These cycles of repetition expose the reality of South Africa’s social conditions. And yet, despite fashion’s appearance as unchanging, its capacity to anticipate the future endows it with a power to radically transform the present.

The artists in After the Thrill is Gone use fashion to shape narratives of representation, identity, memory, xenophobia, violence in the domestic sphere, and allegories of nationalism. Both individually and collectively, these artists locate fashion as a political language and reinterpret the historical terrain of South Africa after the thrill of apartheid’s end is gone.

Accompanied by a digital catalog authored by curator Dr. Andrew Hennlich, WMU assistant professor of art, “After the Thrill is Gone” is the first exhibition to address the intersection of politics, fashion and culture in post-Apartheid South Africa through distinctly theoretical lenses, including the work of Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.

Artists in the exhibition include Kudzanai Chiurai, Julia Rosa Clark, Hasan & Husain Essop, Pierre Fouché, Gabrielle Goliath, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Daniel Halter, Nicholas Hlobo, Gerald Machona, Mohau Modisakeng, Athi-Patra Ruga, and Mary Sibande.

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