Confronting the Absence of Histories, Presence of Traumas and Beauty in Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Abstract

Museum Africa is Johannesburg’s social and cultural history museum and holds within its collection the Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection; an extensive collection of predominantly white-owned European fashion objects with some 16,562 items dating from the 1800 s to the late 1900s, imported into South Africa or made locally. This article documents the continued enquiry between South African fashion designer and artist Wanda Lephoto, London-based fashion curator Alison Moloney, and South African-based fashion curator and academic Dr Erica de Greef who together have been grappling with the violence of absence of black South African fashion histories and narratives that is revealed in the museum’s store. This enquiry is founded on a phenomenological approach to dress curatorship with the intention to unravel the collection’s epistemology through an interrogation of decolonial curatorial methodologies. The artistic interventions aim to disrupt the Eurocentric and exclusionary acquisition practices and fashion discourses that are represented by these seemingly “innocent” but deeply problematic objects. Can an engagement with these fashion objects through experiments with museological interventions decolonize and unpack the complex histories held within the collection and contribute to a process of healing?