After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024

About

After the End of History offers a picture of working-class life today; from Rene Matic’s portrait of growing up mixed race in a white working-class community in Peterborough, to Elaine Constantine‘s documentation of the Northern Soul scene, to Kavi Pujara‘s ode to Leicester’s Hindu community, and JA Mortram’s documentation throughout his life of marginalised people while working as a caregiver.

2024, when the exhibition was first conceived, marked 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the symbolic end of Communism. For the economist Francis Fukuyama, writing in the early 1990s, this celebrated triumph of Western Liberal Democracy as the only viable future for global politics represented the “End of History”.

The counter-cultural energies of the 1980s, very often powered up by the alternative ideologies embodied by Communism, and a reaction against Thatcherism, produced a collective, coherent and politically engaged generation of working-class artists. But after the so-called “End of History” was announced in the 1990s, what became of working-class culture and the working class creative? What kind of images has working-class life produced in the last 35 years? After The End of History aims to illuminate these questions.