Penny Siopis
For Dear Life. A Retrospective
This major publication, with texts in English and Greek, accompanies Penny Siopis's first major museum retrospective in Europe, curated by Katerina Gregos, director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens. In her preface, Gregos describes Siopis as 'one of the most important artistic voices of her generation on the African continent and beyond'. She writes:
Born in South Africa in 1953 to Greek parents, Siopis came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with her historically and culturally charged paintings that exercised critique against colonialism, apartheid, racism and sexism. She went on to experiment with other media such as installation and film, in the process creating a rich, incisive and poignant body of work which, whilst diverse, remained coherent in its conceptual, political and ethical positioning. Siopis has consistently engaged with the persistence and fragility of memory, notions of truth and accountability, the rights of women and the disenfranchised, the issue of vulnerability, and the complex entanglements of the private and the public. Working in a wide range of materials from paint, ink, glue and newspaper clippings to found film and ready-made objects, for fifty years Siopis has explored the politics of the body, grief and shame as they play out within personal and collective histories, especially in her home country, South Africa.
The exhibition includes works from all Siopis's major series from the early 1980s onwards, and the catalogue features images of these works alongside new and recent texts: Olga Speakes interweaves the artist’s biography with the sociocultural framework of South African history; Griselda Pollock reflects on materiality, medium and memory as the 'triple coordinates' of Siopis's painting; Achille Mbembe distills the essence of Siopis’s practice in terms of vitality, energy and the sheer force of life; Sinazo Chiya focuses on the empathic dimension of the historico-political in Siopis’s practice; Pumla Dineo Gqola meditates on shame in Siopis’s work from a black, feminist perspective; Laura Rascaroli situates Siopis's films in terms of post-cinema and the decolonial essay-film while Katerina Gregos writes on their Hellenic context; and Penny Siopis converses with William Kentridge and writes about 'the life of things' in relation to her artwork Will.
ΕΜΣΤ - National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens | 2024
Hardcover, 392 pages | ISBN 978-618-5507-19-0 | Price: TBC (awaiting stock)
