In the vibrant and conceptually layered work of Thania Petersen, particularly in her staged photographs and densely embroidered tapestries, we witness a compelling monad that intertwines postcolonial critique, identity performance, and a sharp interrogation of how racialized bodies and cultural narratives are absorbed, distorted, or exoticized by global consumer culture; Petersen constructs scenes where traditional signifiers—Islamic garments, African patterns, ancestral roles—collide with Western commercial imagery such as superheroes, fast food chains, and pop-cultural iconography, revealing the psychic and symbolic violence of neoliberal aesthetics, which often flattens or commodifies complex subjectivities into digestible spectacle, as seen in the image of a woman in abaya holding a child dressed as Spider-Man, flanked by other children in superhero masks, a poignant visual metaphor for the disintegration of lineage and cultural memory under the influence of globalized media, or in the embroidered tableau crowded with logos like KFC, McDonald’s, and Hungry Lion amid wild animals, tropical plants, and hyper-feminized figures, where Petersen stages a lush but disorienting consumer jungle that satirizes the fetishization of African identity within capitalist fantasy; these works do not simply critique—they also reterritorialize, using irony, saturation, and visual excess as a strategy of aesthetic resistance, reclaiming visibility on the artist’s own terms and challenging the viewer to question their complicity in consuming cultural difference as spectacle, thus each piece stands as a self-contained act of cultural and political reclamation.
