12/11/2003 – 31/1/2004
PENNY SIOPIS
Siopis was born in 1953, Vryburg, Western Cape, South Africa of Greek descent.
She was educated at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1974 BA Fine Arts with distinction, and 1976 MA Fine Arts with distinction. In 1979 she did a Postgraduate course in painting, Portsmouth Polytechnic, United Kingdom
She has taught in a numbers of Universities in S.Africa and England.
Penny has curated and organised a number of exhibitions, including “South African Women’s Mail Art” in the USA in 1990; “Women Choose Women” in South Africa in 1991; “Pictures as History” in South Africa in 1992; “Purity and Danger” in South Africa 1997.
She has also worked in a number of community projects and contributed to anti-apartheid arts activities throughout South Africa. Penny Siopis also writes on contemporary South African art and has a particular interest in gender and race issues as these intersect with notions of history and memory. She has also worked on a number of important projects.
Penny Siopis works in installation, video, film, painting and photography. Her choice of medium is dictated to be the nature of the specific work; for her the concrete physicality of the medium is as important as the ideas mediated. A compelling instance of this physicality is her film My Lovely Day (1997), made for the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. Cut from home movie footage her mother took in South Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s, this work emphasises the artifactual quality of the technologies of celluloid – dust spots, sprocket marks, faded colour and camera jerk – as a way to picture memory. The memory in this case is a personal story of one family’s migration from Greece to South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, but it also speaks to wider experiences of migration and displacement in this ‘post-colonial’ global moment.
For this show, Siopis is exhibiting a series of small paintings and an installation of found objects. Both paintings and objects reflect the public and psychological state of shame; the objects as cultural remnants – evidence – of shameful histories, and the paintings as the more intimate imaginary – fantasy – of shame given physical form.
Shame is part of conflict, and current global conflicts have reinserted a sense of shame onto the public stage. However powerfully shame is recognised and represented, it has neither a single face nor a common language. It exists rather in fragments – in the cultural detritus left over from unexpected trauma, and in the imagined spectres of fear, loathing, loss and fright which surface in our visual cultures in the wake of traumatic wounding. Mostly these spectres show only the merest of traces – intense fear or fright in a shape, a texture, colours – of what they seek to picture.
Shame involves psychological nakedness, exposure, humiliation, hurt, guilt, deep embarrassment. When shamed, we lose our dignity and integrity in
full view of others – we live in a state of disgrace. But in South Africa ‘shame’ is also colloquially an expression of sympathy for, and identification with, someone else’s public pain. If you should fall in the street people, for instance, might exclaim “shame” or cry out “sorry”, even though they are not to blame for your fall. The Afrikaans version of this crying out at hurt is ‘siestog’, tellingly translated as a mixture of disgust (sies) and cute (tog). Often ‘siestog’ implies an almost sentimental kindness.
In the recent South African past, shame has been dramatised and confronted as a state of hurt and complicity in the hurt of others. Our Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) staged this hurt and complicity in public shows of shame, expressed in the languages of human suffering, apologetics, confession, protestations of good faith, exposures of bad faith. After this historical moment all sorts of urban legends have emerged which bespeak the state of shame, legends connecting the most public of political events to the most private and intimate of individual experiences.
shame
However powerfully shame is recognized and represented, it has neither a single face nor a common language. It exists rather in fragments – in the cultural detritus left over from unexpected trauma, and in the imagined spectres of fear, loathing, loss and fright which surface in our visual cultures in the wake of traumatic woundings. Mostly these spectres show only the merest of traces – intense feelings captured in fleeting shapes, texture, colours.
Shame involves psychological nakedness, exposure, humiliation, hurt, guilt, deep embarrassment. When shamed, we lose our dignity and integrity in full view of others – we live in a state of disgrace. But in South Africa, to say «shame» is also to express sympathy for, and identification with, someone else’s public pain. If you should fall in the street people, for instance, might exclaim «shame» or cry out «sorry», even though they are not to blame for your fall. The Afrikaans version of this crying out at hurt is ‘siestog’, tellingly translated – in my mind – as a mixture of disgust (sies) and pity (tog).
In the recent South African past, shame has been dramatised and confronted as a state of hurt and complicity in the hurt of others. Our Truth and Reconciliation Commission staged this hurt and complicity in public shows of shame, expressed in the languages of human suffering, apologetics, confession, protestations of good faith, exposures of bad faith. After this historical moment all sorts of stories have emerged which bespeak the state of shame, and which connect the most public of political events to the most private and intimate of individual experiences.
Penny Siopis