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Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis

Names: Siopis, Penny

Born: 1953, Vryburg, Northern Cape Province, South Africa

In summary: South African Artist

 

Penny Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg in the Northern Cape Province. She studied Fine Arts at Rhodes University and Portsmouth Polytechnic before taking up a lecturing position at the Natal Technikon in Durban. In 1984, she moved to Johannesburg and has lectured in the Department of Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University (Wits) ever since.

Figure 1: Dora and the Other Woman (1988), pastel on paper, private collection. Source: uwic.ac.uk

Siopis has exhibited locally and internationally since 1975, and has won a variety of awards including the Volkskas Atelier Award, and the Vita Art Now award. Her work is well represented in South African and international collections.

In the eighties, Siopis became well known for her baroque banquet paintings (especially Melancholia) and history paintings. She used random objects in her work, which commented on colonialism, gender, and discriminatory practises of all kinds.

Figure 1 is an example of one of Siopis’ history paintings of the 1980s. She spent seven months in Paris in 1986, and during this period became fascinated by Dora (Ida Bauer), a hysteric who had been analysed by psychologist, Sigmund Freud. In the drawing Dora and the Other Woman, Siopis cast herself in the role of Dora and, in keeping with feminists who re-read Dora’s case, Siopis found in the hysteria of Freud’s famous patient the visualization of resistance and rebellion against patriarchy, and the expression of what she termed ‘dis-ease’ rather than ‘disease’.

The ‘Other Woman’ in the title of the work is on one level a reference to the ways in which hysteria was presented as a symptom of the ‘otherness’ of woman in ‘scientific’ studies of the disorder. Simultaneously, however, it refers to Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman shipped from South Africa to Europe in 1810, toured as a sideshow spectacle in England and France, and whose body was dissected by the French anatomist, Cuvier, after her premature death on 1 January 1816.

Figure 2: This is an example of recent installation by Siopis titled, Sympathetic Magic. Source: artthrob.co.za

In Siopis’ drawing, various caricatures of Baartman that appeared in the popular press in England and France are pinned to Dora’s drape or scattered on the floor. Baartman was fascinating to Europeans because she manifested the condition of steatopygea (enlarged buttocks) and also because of the formation of her genitals known as the ‘Hottentot apron’ or ‘tablier’.

Baartman could therefore be likened to Dora: if nineteenth-century Europeans interpreted Baartman’s physiognomy as a sign of her primitive sexuality, they viewed Dora’s hysteria as a marker of dark primal urges awaiting discovery by the intrepid explorer/scientist. As Siopis says, ‘Freud’s comment about female sexuality being “the dark continent” of psychology connects Dora and Saartjie.’

Figure 3: Slings and arrows (2007 oil and glue on canvas).

In the 1990’s, Siopis extended her range of media to include monumental installations, film and video (See Figure 2). The main focus of Siopis’ works is often visualised in existing objects, as she states: "Long I have been intrigued with the idea of an object as narrator. As the saying goes, "If walls (chairs, lamps, cutlery, or bowls) could talk, what tales they would tell?"

Siopis is particularly interested in the intersection of biography and autobiography in narrating aspects of South African history through film, and the questions raised by the changes in South Africa’s history. Her concern with history and memory has led her to become an important analyst of race and gender issues. Such interest can be seen in Slings and Arrows, an example of one of the artist’s more recent works (Figure 3). This work is part of a series in which she describes as a 'human tableau' that engages in uncomfortable conversations about emotional, sexual and physical abuse.

Siopis currently holds the position of Associate Professor in Fine Arts and is the chairperson of the department's governing committee.

References

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