Sunset/Aftermath, 2022. R8500

Sonsondergang/Nasleep [Sunset/Aftermath], 2022.Mixed media on canvas, 500x500mm. Framed. R8500
Sold through Rust-en-Vrede Gallery, gallery@rust-en-vrede.com
 
 
Sunset/Aftermath deals with my memories of the traumatic loss of my entire home and my belongings during the 2017 event of the Knysna Great Fire. 
 
Romanian academic Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory[1] is concerned with collective trauma that manifests in the work of so-called post-generational artists and their practising of a post-generational aesthetic. Hirsch points to the fact that genocide and collective trauma have occurred more frequently since the end of the twentieth century. She exposes the roots of familial and affiliated traumatic events that have an impact into the present time and bring about a kind of ownership, even into the later generations that did not experience the trauma directly. Although Hirsch’s theorising of post-memory was initially concerned with the Holocaust, her understanding of the term can be effectively expanded to other cultural contexts, as to South African apartheid. 
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[1] Marianne Hirsch, 2008. The generation of postmemory. Poetics Today vol 29 (Spring, 1): 103-128. © 2008 Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.