Lali van Zuydam
Museum Africa in Newtown is unveiling Fashion Accounts, a thought-provoking exhibition that explores the politics of collecting, archiving, and memorialising history through dress.
Curated by South African designer Wanda Lephoto, fashion academic Dr Erica de Greef, and UK-based curator Alison Moloney, Fashion Accounts presents installations that examine memory, resistance, and preservation.
The exhibition features new commissions by The Sartists and Mimi Duma, as well as works by South African designers Thebe Magugu and Sindiso Khumalo, addressing colonial influences in Museum Africa’s collection.
“Fashion Accounts is both an account of fashion practices, historic and contemporary, which represent resistance and liberation and a stage to hold fashion to account as a tool of colonialism,” said Moloney.
Museum Africa’s collections, including a 14 000-piece ethnographic archive and 11 000 photographs, highlight untold histories from South Africa’s past. Its Bernberg Fashion & Textiles Collection, comprising 16 000 predominantly European, white-owned fashion items, spans from the 1700s to the early 2000s and reflects the colonial power structures embedded in material culture.
“It is in the gaps, the absences, the fragments that we need to look to find ourselves when our stories are not acknowledged in the record,” said Lephoto.
He said that Fashion Accounts is about more than clothing, but rather about reclaiming history.
The curators have worked with Museum Africa’s displays and archival items to create installations that confront gaps in historical representation.
“There is an urgent need to decolonise museum classification and representation practices,” said De Greef.
“Fashion objects in museum collections offer powerful visual and material pathways for remembering more diverse South African histories, identities, and subjectivities.”
The exhibition is funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, with support from the French Institute of South Africa and the City of Johannesburg.
“Fashion Accounts is part of a broader commitment by the French government to support the fashion industry and other Cultural and Creative Industries, which are a key priority,” said Emmanuelle Denavit-Feller of the French Institute of South Africa. “Over the years, we’ve established several partnerships to support the local creative industries, particularly fashion, and have long supported the South African fashion ecosystem, especially for emerging designers,” she said.
Fashion Accounts opens to the public from November 15, 2024 to February 28, 2025. Entrance is free, with visiting hours from 9am to 5pm, Tuesday to Sunday, and parking available at Mary Fitzgerald Square.