Penny Siopis. Ink, blood and history

Penny Siopis (Veryburg, South Africa, 1953) lives and works in South Africa, where her family, Greek descent,  settled after the Second World War. Her artistic practice explores the intersection between personal and collective memory, dealing with topics like the struggle against apartheid and the repressive policies of colonists against the native population.

Her work, polyphonic and interdisciplinary, straddles painting, drawing and film, combining the intimate with the historical and the symbolic with the political. One of her most significant projects is Shame, an extensive body of works in which shrunken or diluted bodies make up a universe in which shame is a narrative and emotional thread. Siopis traces a history of humanity marked by humiliation and violence, but also by the possibility of recognition and catharsis.

In Siopis’ work, shame is deployed as a territory of shared pain and collective catharsis which, from a Lacanian perspective, alludes to the loss of the symbolic place of love and connection. At the same time, this space is open to a dimension of enjoyment: the body, in its fragility, seeks in the death wish a possible means of redemption and sublimation. Shame questions the limits of the body and of history and reveals how the wound, personal or collective, can become poetic and political material, a kind of resistance against oblivion.

The exhibition also includes Charmed Lives (1998–1999), a large canvas of found objects that acts as a collective memory woven around individual experiences. Also, the archive takes up a central position in the work of this artist: cupboards with sealed drawers evoke a hidden memory, made invisible by dominant discourses. This exhibition, presenting Siopis’ work in Barcelona for the first time, weaves relations between the memories of north and south.

Penny Siopis, Charmed Lives, 1998-1999. Photo: Mike Hall. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson