The individual works, series and exhibitions of Siopis have been written about extensively. In the context of this exhibition, it is the ways in which the work has been curated through the colour and concept of red that form a series of conversations that reveal ideological, political and emotional lessons. Art has an important transformative potential in society. It is in the narratives that Siopis’ works reveal that we are able to learn – not only about our social condition – and, more importantly, to start imagining alternatives.
Implicit in Siopis’ work is a critical engagement with materials that explore the complex power relations that are inscribed into our bodies in contemporary South Africa. Between the disfigured nipple of a cupcake and a hairy pink featureless face, a conversation about trauma and society emerges, reminding us how history manifests not in dated and dotted timelines, but in the myths that shape our imagination and nightmares. Siopis’ work addresses the complex emotional landscapes that emerge through fear, shame and passion, and how these intersect with the ways society is constantly being shaped through shifting power relations.
Siopis’ exploration of ‘white’ decadence and excess in paintings such as Melancholia (1986), echoed by her grandmother’s disdain for the ‘charmed lives’ of her grandchildren in the video installation My Lovely Day (1997), emerged as a product of her critical engagement with segregated apartheid society and a legacy of colonialism – where the simultaneity of affluence and abject poverty and powerlessness were ever-present, although actively ignored by those in power. The decadence of the moneyed elite has not abated with the end of apartheid. With the recent embracing of neoliberal individualist capitalism, these grotesque images have become increasingly legitimized and aspirational. As we watch our politicians fatten, paying lip service to the red of the revolution, their waists drooping like Siopis’ Cakes, these paintings reveal the irony implicit in political power and elite transition in transition. The conditions of labour may have shifted, but the conditions and symbols of affluence and power have not.
The Lasso series, speaks directly to the ever-present violence in our society – “the effects of violence weigh particularly heavy on too many of us. What we don’t experience directly, we imagine” (Siopis, 2007). The materiality of the glue, a waxy replica of skin and the way it glows and decays, fixes the colour while at the same time making it appear to shy away from the figures Siopis has created. These figures are gruesome, bathing in and dripping clotted blood. The figures are as plastic as the toys in Charmed Lives (1999), and as real as the weapons dotted between them. In many ways we have stopped imagining alternatives to the violence we have normalized as part of our lives. But the violence – whether lived or imagined – does not disappear. It appears in the ways we produce and reproduce power in our homes, neighbourhoods, cities, governments and worlds. Siopis is challenging us to recognize these relationships.Pinky Pinky and the Shame series offer a possibility to challenge this in our thinking and practice.
Pinky Pinky engages an urban legend developed by children at the time of transition around 1994. Working from the descriptions she collected from children in and around Johannesburg, Siopis developed a series of creatures that embody this mythical creature. Siopis’ renditions of Pinky Pinky feature a lusciously grotesque layering of pink paint around the plastic eyes of dolls, eyelashes and gaping wounds. The faces are otherwise blank, leaving the space for the viewers’ imagination to fill in the rest of the unformed features. These creatures represent an externalization of the fears of children during the volatility surrounding transition. The absence of a bloody civil war did not mean the transition was not emotionally violent, especially for children who are typically excluded from political discussions.
Siopis’ Shame series (2002) shows haunting images of trauma that serves to undermine the seemingly innocuous messages provided by the childlike greeting card stamps they are juxtaposed with. Each image depicts moments of the embodiment of shame, more often than not revealing women in compromised or compromising situations, where 'Happy Fathers Day' and 'I’m Sorry' take on new and eerie meanings in the context of the image. In Pinky Pinky and the Shame series a conversation emerges about how race and gender manifest in the undercurrent power relations shaped by social and political silence.
During Penny Siopis’ walkabout through the KZNSA gallery, a woman voiced her concern about showing children these violent images as they could negatively impact on children, her imagining of children being presumably based on a somewhat Victorian notion of children as innocent creatures who need protection. In contradistinction, it is in engaging children with these discussions that a transformative platform emerges. Siopis asserts that shame is both a devastating and empowering emotion. Like the blood oozing beneath our flesh, shame makes us human. It is in engaging with shame that we learn from it.
The transformative potential of contemporary art lies in what it asks us to confront and question. It asks us to make choices that should impact on the way we choose to think, speak and most importantly, act.
Penny Siopis recounts a somewhat Brechtian story when explaining her 2009 painting entitled Miracle. Two mothers find themselves on the roof of a burning building clutching their babies and are faced with a dilemma to save their children – run downstairs through a burning building or drop their baby several floors into the arms of a crowd waiting below. Both choose to drop their baby. Both babies are caught. Both mothers live in marginalized migrant communities amidst an increasing climate of xenophobic violence – one in South Africa, the other in Germany. The culmination of these two stories in Siopis’ painting demonstrates a savage interconnectedness of a global reality of violence and volatility in our city spaces. But one not without its miracles.
