Lemkus Gallery is excited to present after library II by Thulile Gamedze. The After Library (2025–) blends collective reading with speculative design and the wear of clothing. It is a tiny library of clothes and books, designed and procured for the purposes of being worn and being read. The After Library’s interests include (but are not limited to) big, small, and obscure histories of resistance and liberation, Black and Queer subjectivities, Southern African cultural work lineages, and most pressingly, people and the information they bring to both the books they read and the clothes they wear.
In the After Library, Gamedze reads texts selected by friends and collaborators, and thereafter engages a responsive ‘translation’ process, where their ideas prompt her free design of garments that are multi-size, and fit (somewhere) within the scope of their selectors’ personal styles. These garment-texts form the loanable ‘books’ of the Library, whose wear is documented and then archived via loaner written feedback.
The underlying idea of the After Library is this: The wear of a 1. garment, together with the wear of a 2. text (via reading), must soften and burden both objects. Every reader and every wearer erodes and injects the fabric and the text with their own flair, memory, and knowledge, collectivising the tasks of reading and learning, and recognising that these tasks are ultimately always shaped by our experiences of everyday life as embodied subjects.
For its pilot in March of 2025, the Library presented its first seven books with its texts selected or compiled by collaborators as a result of their political, historical, social or artistic significance to the Southern African context. Books AL001–007, saw Thandi Gamedze’s selection of The Kairos Document: A Challenge to the Church, 1985 and A moment of truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering, 2009; Tlotliso Skefu’s selection of K Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams, 2001; Kamva Matuis’s selection of Hugo ka Canham's Riotous Deathscapes, 2023; Abri de Swardt’s selection of GALA's Pride: Protest and Celebration, 2006 and Peter Clarke's Fanfare catalogue documenting the artist’s 2004 collage exhibition at Stevenson Gallery; Max Thesen Law's essay zine, entitled Oranje, Blanje, Blou & Liggaamsbou: a partial history of the 1975 Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition, 2025; Nombuso Mathibela’s selection of Chabani Manganyi's Being Black in the World, 1973; and finally, Abigail Dawson’s selection of Ellen Kuzwayo's Sit Down and Listen, 1990.
For its second iteration, the After Library has produced five new books, while continuing loans of its existing collection. AL008–012 engage with Jared Leite’s selection of Richard Rive’s 1990 Emergency Continued; Qondiswa James’s selection of the 2019 anthology They Called me Queer, edited by Kim Windvogel and Kelly-Eve Koopman; Tlotliso Skefu’s selection of Thomas Mofolo’s 1925 Chaka, and its English translation by Daniel P Kunene from 1981; Lungiswa Gqunta’s selection of the 2016 anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mai’a Williams, and China Martens; and finally, Asher Gamedze’s selection of Amilcar Cabral’s 1973 collection Return to the source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, with particular focus on “National Liberation and Culture”, a speech given by Cabral in 1970.
Each book is accompanied by documentation of its design process and collected records of its loan and wear history thus far, with some garments fresher on the scene than others. Offerings from collaborators, including notes, ideas and drawings are also present.
The garment, and its implied objective of wear, ultimately informs Gamedze’s artistic production as a whole. In After Library II, a spectrum of textile works — part of her ongoing SHAPED QUILTS series — ambiguously integrate amongst the library books, at times posing as garments, and at other times, departing into abstraction and fully succumbing to the containment of frames. The numbered and archived fabric reconfigurations lift materials from the surrounding library garments, the offcuts they employ articulating the inverse of the artist’s previous cut-and-sew processes. As considerately organised remains of past designs, their former lives are never far away, the ink-stamped numbers referencing their place in an ongoing filed archive of scraps, which trace the materials moving through Gamedze’s studio, and their deployment in quilts, library work, or one-of-one garments for sale.
The Library’s research, which is earnestly ongoing, works towards a more developed practice of “worn pedagogy” that considers the value that touch, wear, or embodiment bring to objects, as one possible response to the historical cultural ruptures caused by colonial looting and re-authoring of African belongings as ‘untouchable’ artworks and artefacts. The project is also interested in finding literal ways to translate and document the affective characteristics of wear, collecting written reflections from loaners that attempt to trace what they have left behind in the borrowed clothes and books. Ultimately, the After Library is a reading project, which leans into feminist approaches as it seeks to expand, make conscious, and value the invisible and embodied forces that people bring to any text or thing.
Furthering the Library’s work of situating clothes as the porous mediators between the world and people, in 2026, Tlotliso Skefu and Thulile Gamedze will co-produce ‘scenes’ for the library books as the contexts for live readings. Furthermore, Thuli continues the project as a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape.
