Penny Siopis’s “Poetics of Vulnerability”

ATHENS — Penny Siopis, the South African artist of Greek descent, should be a household name in contemporary art. Through a major retrospective that spans five decades of painting, video, sculpture, and installation, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) makes exactly that proposition. For Dear Life, curated by Katerina Gregos, is Siopis’s first such show in Europe. Works of breathtaking breadth and depth explore violence, memory, and what the artist has called “the poetics of vulnerability” in media ranging from oil paint and glue to ephemera and found film, spanning the intimate to the monumental.

True to its ambition, the retrospective includes work from each of Siopis’s major series, demonstrating the artist’s risk-taking and ever-evolving process. Formally disparate works are tied together by sensory and conceptual threads — with an emphasis on materiality and the interweaving of personal and public histories — that make her entire oeuvre far more than the sum of its parts. 

Siopis first garnered attention for her Cake paintings (1980–84), rooted in her early experiences in the family bakery in Vryburg. These feed on cakes as symbols of celebration and commemoration, but also on their ephemerality: elaborate confections are destined to grow stale or be devoured, suggesting the intimate horror of aging and decay. Everywhere in her work, private and public histories are entangled. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Siopis has described the bakery as a charmed space interrupted by the reality of apartheid. In the catalog Penny Siopis: Time and Again she recalls the day when one of the Black workers arrived at the family’s doorstep bleeding from an act of racial violence as “a traumatic moment in a kind of idyll.”

Very different in style are the History paintings (1985–95), whose baroque excess draws on European traditions of allegory. History painting, long considered the most elevated genre of classical European art, was originally unavailable to women, who were steered instead toward still life and domestic themes. “Melancholia” (1986) offers an ironic take on this legacy of exclusion by pairing classical sculpture with food and flowers: an orgy of consumption that doubles as a critique of Western ideological and extractive sprawl. Another important work, for its provocative medium and theme in 1980s apartheid South Africa, is “Patience on a Monument: ‘A History Painting’” (1988). Siopis combines a collage of racist images from school textbooks with a thick impasto, conveying in both form and matter the banal dissemination of colonial ideology as a catastrophe of meaning, edging out truth by filling the mental and pictorial horizon to the brim. A Black Patience figure seated at the center recalls cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus“: the angel of history whose face is turned toward the past experienced as an ever-mounting pile of ruins. She is quietly peeling a lemon. This generative intermingling of mundane and rarefied references is a signature of Siopis’s style and key to its layered signification.

So is innovation born of Siopis’s idiosyncratic collecting, shown in her video works (1994–2021). The artist spliced together home movies found in flea markets with her mother’s family footage and added soundtrack and captions. “My Lovely Day” (1997) draws on her grandmother’s exilic stories of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and Siopis’s own diasporic identity to draw parallels between Greek and South African political violence and trauma.

The halting, ghostly assemblages bear witness to larger narratives, from the unlikely assassination of the architect of apartheid, H.F. Verwoerd, by the Greek Mozambican migrant Demetrios Tsafendas in “Obscure White Messenger” (2010) to the quiet epidemic of domestic violence running alongside COVID in “Shadow Shame Again” (2021). Historical narrative is stitched together from the contingent, flawed visual archives of strangers and embroidered with the pathos of transience and loss.

The same aesthetic of the assemblage assumes a radically different form in Siopis’s installations, Charmed Lives (1998–99) and Will (1997–ongoing). In these still-growing, ever-morphing accretions of personal, found, and gifted objects — some of which are destined to be dispersed among the artist’s friends upon her death — human itineraries are charted through the social lives of things.

Siopis’s practice draws on many theoretical currents: feminism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, late 20th-century French philosophy. But concept is not allowed to dominate matter or empty it of its tactile, sensuous appeal and, often, horror. Her thick application of paint takes on the texture of food or skin in the Cake series; her melding of figure and ground unsettles the division between abstraction and figuration in the more recent Pinky Pinky series (2002–4). Pinky Pinky is an urban legend in South Africa that speaks to the uncanny cultural and sexual tangle of female adolescence: a half-human, half-animal creature that prowls on prepubescent girls in restrooms. Here, the artist plays with the limits of form at its most visceral, “dragging it to the verge of formlessness,” as she notes. Color and texture that trouble the boundary between skin and flesh, bodies both intact and flayed, or distilled into a single anatomical part with its appendages of teeth or nails, Pinky Pinky embodies materiality outstripping language to convey an unspeakable or nameless dread.

Few artists have such power to make us aware of our dual modes of cognition, cerebral and visceral. Few artists compel the visitor to alternate between the states of perpetrator and sufferer, viewer and viewed, intimacy and exposure.

The exhibition is the flagship event of a year-long cycle, centered on female-identified artists, titled What If Women Ruled the World? A possible answer might be that cultural amnesia about past violence and its ongoing legacies is harder to maintain in the presence of Siopis’s haunting entanglement of the body in history.

Penny Siopis: For Dear Life: A Retrospective continues at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) (Leoforos Kallirois and Amvrosiou Frantzi, Athens, Greece) through January 12, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Katerina Gregos.