a lunchtime walkabout of Time and Again by Penny Siopis

IZIKO South African National Gallery Government Avenue, Company’s Garden, Cape Town

Time and Again is a retrospective look at three and a half decades of Siopis’s creative production. It features key examples from her seminal bodies of work which include her early Cake paintings and iconic History paintings through to her Shame and Pinky Pinky series and her more recent ink and glue paintings. Iterations of her well known found-object installations and her films using found footage are also presented.

Siopis’s abiding interest in what she calls the ‘poetics of vulnerablity’  – manifest in the tension between materiality and image – coalesces with all her explorations, whether these engage with history, sexuality, race, memory, estrangement and violence. The processes of change, decay and ageing (all traces of the passage of time) are integral to her approach and highlight her interest in making time tangible through her manipulation of process, chance and materiality.

Siopis has exhibited widely locally and internationally. She has participated in the biennales of Venice, Sydney, Guangzhou (China), Johannesburg, Havana and Gwangju (South Korea). Solo exhibitions include Obscure White Messenger at Brandts, Odense, Denmark (2014); Who’s Afraid of the Crowd, Stevenson, Cape Town (2011); Red: The Iconography of Colour in the Work of Penny Siopis, KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009); and Three Essays on Shame, The Freud Museum, London (2005).  Recent film screenings include Smalfilmtage, Dresden (2015); Penny Siopis Films at Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); This is a True Story, Frieze art fair, London, (2012); and Hantologie des Colonies, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Unfinished Conversations, Beirut Art Centre, Beirut, (2015); Parle pour Toi: Reprises, Montages, Histoires, Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (2014); Public Intimacy: Art and Social Life in South Africa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Prism: Drawing from 1990-2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); The New Worlds and the Old 1: Traffic of Legends, Khiasma, Paris (2012).