Penny Siopis
Never the Same Water Twice
This booklet features new writing by Penny Siopis on film and painting, and is published on the occasion of her exhibitions Never the Same Water Twice: Nine Films (1997-2021) at Stevenson Cape Town and Feral Figurations, comprising new and recent painting, in Johannesburg. The exhibitions and booklet work independently and in tandem to articulate the artist’s long-held and continually redefined philosophies around materiality, found forms and radical contingency. In an extract titled 'Reflections', Siopis writes:
Light hits quiet water and mirrors the scene around, turning it upside down. If water is disturbed, light fractures and the double blurs. Whatever happens, the two are joined at the hip.
Could the join be the splash? The rupture in the line? The productive tension between reference and materiality as I see it, the fluid ground from which potential images emerge. Or what Zygmunt Bauman might call “liquid modernity”, a constant flow of new beginnings. Practically speaking, it is a way to engage the perennial question posed to me: how do your films and paintings relate?
Published by Stevenson | 2023
Softcover, 26 pages including covers | Price: R50
