Stills host the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024. The group exhibition brings together working class artists who use photography to explore the nuances of life in all its diversity today, turning their gaze towards both their communities and out to the wider world. The exhibition takes place from 21 March – 28 June 2025 (preview 20 March, 6pm-8pm). After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 is curated by Johny Pitts who has previously exhibited at Stills in 2023. The exhibition will also be the first to open at the gallery under the new Directorship at Stills of Vivienne Gamble, who takes up her role in early 2025.
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 Constaintine’s documentation of the Northern Soul scene, to Kavi Pujara 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.
Artists in the exhibition include; Richard Billingham, Sam Blackwood, Serena Brown, Antony Cairns, Rob Clayton, Joanne Coates, Josh Cole, Artúr Čonka, Elaine Constantine, Natasha Edgington, Richard Grassick, Anna Magnowska, Rene Matic, J A Mortram, Kelly O’Brien, Eddie Otchere, Kavi Pujara, Khadija Saye, Chris Shaw, Trevor Smith, Ewen Spencer, Hannah Starkey, Igoris Taran, Nathaniel Telemaque, Barbara Wasiak and Tom Wood.
Johny Pitts, Curator of After the End of History, says:
Developing a show with Hayward Gallery Touring, which pieces together complex and counterintuitive expressions of working class life through the lens, has been a deeply enriching process. I hope the extraordinary work included offers not only a celebration of the craft and creativity of working class practitioners, but also engages, surprises and inspires a working class audience, and anyone interested in art against-the-odds.
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition curated by Johny Pitts with Hayward Gallery Touring.
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