'Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and other tales'

In her new body of work, Senzeni Marasela uses needlework to make pointed connections between living memory within her own family and the scandalous history of Sarah Baartman. In addressing Sarah’s history, Marasela considers her own mother’s physical abuse and terror of the big city as a site of racism and segregation, and her own challenges as a mother working in the city today.

As a child, Marasela watched her mother find refuge in needlework, always using red thread, as if to suture the secret wounds that psychologically inhibited her from mothering. Marasela’s embroidered cloths and servant’s dresses needle painful truths and memories to the surface, yet they read as caring gestures that provide cover and redress, and hold the hope of healing histories written in blood. They also prick the collective conscience, because the audience is always implicated.

25 September - 31 October