National Museum of Contemporary Art Αthens (ΕΜΣΤ)
17.05 - 16.02.2025
Penny Siopis tells me that the idea of the “Angelus Novus” intrigues her. In Walter Benjamin’s text On the Concept of History (published 1942) he describes the “angel” as being so weighed down by the debris from humanity’s catastrophic past that it cannot face the present, let alone the future. One can see why this idea captivates Siopis, for at the centre of her art is history. Siopis and I are at her retrospective at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMΣT) curated by the Museum Director Katerina Gregos. The exhibition is organised according to Siopis’ major works — from her early Cake paintings, History and Pinky Pinky series, to her recent work using glue and ink such as Shame. Alongside the two-dimensional works are some films including My Lovely Day (1997) and Shadow Shame Again (2021) and the installation, Will (1997-ongoing).
I have had the pleasure of seeing many of Siopis’ work before and one unknown painting catches my eye. It is Al Fresco (1990) from the History series. Held in a private collection, it is rarely seen in public. The work is painted to look like three panels. It is the two flanking side “panels” that first caught my eye, with images of over-scaled ornate curtain ties and graceful classical figures set in a black flatness that evokes a bas-relief. The central “panel” could not be more different. It is a landscape of a morass of pit mines and labouring miners with images sourced from newspaper articles and journals. Over the collage, Siopis has applied visible but transparent washes of paint, giving the surface tactility and the impression of dirty, sun-dried skin. As a critique of colonialism, the message is clear, but it is Siopis’ use of Western artistic tropes, not for aggrandisement but for subversion, that adds depth. The juxtapositions of the classical figures against the labouring bodies and of precious oil paint and decorative gilt frame against the cheap disposable newsprint bring poignancy in the comparison of the wealth of the West to the depletion of African resources. The placement of the horizon line above the top edge of the composition tilts the landscape towards the viewer, such that the impression is not of a receding scene but that at any moment the viewer could be “tipped” into it. We are not bearing witness to history but are a part of it – as the exploiter or the exploited.
That her work creates not just a visual but also a physical presence could be said to be a hallmark of Siopis’ art. This is even more evident in the Pinky Pinky series. South Africans know Pinky Pinky as an amorphous creature with some human features. Siopis gives hers a shade of pink that is usually associated with young girls and bright blue eyes and soft shapes, suggestive of human babies. But this delight is offset by Pinky Pinkies’ surface textures which is like the flesh of dying fish. The baby/monster is both familiar and repugnant, the known and the unknown, the human and non-human, ourselves and “the other”. Siopis tells me that the Pinky Pinky series is especially popular with viewers. She did not know if the Greek and South African versions of the monster were the same, but the visitors’ attention spoke of the universality of the fear.
The retrospective also includes works made within the last two decades, one of the earliest is Shame (2002-05). Made up of a series of hundreds of small paintings, the work renders the narratives that came out from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa when victims and perpetrators spoke of the violations perpetuated during the apartheid period. The glue with ink of mostly alizarin crimson, a deep almost-burnt red, is effective in creating a viscosity in the marks that allow them to be read as blood and bodily fluids. The sense of corporeality, of the individual, is also created by the scale of each painting. At about half of an A4-sized sheet of paper, a painting would be comfortably held in a person’s cupped hands. Together, the individual paintings speak of collective trauma.
The history of South Africa is important in Siopis’ work and the most effective works on the subject are those that intertwine the nation’s history with the personal, for example, Will (1997). It consists of found objects, each accompanied by a brief note of Siopis’ relationship with it, which will be bequeathed to unnamed individuals upon her passing. There are seemingly whimsical objects such as the detergent Reckitt Blue and a plastic Mr Peanut piggybank. There are politically relevant souvenirs such as the three deflated balloons bearing the words “Mandela, People’s Choice” used in a political rally in the run-up to the first post-apartheid election of 1994, retrieved by Siopis’ son. There is also a taxidermized small deer, that Siopis purchased in an estate auction following the murder of her neighbour. Learning this, the sense of vulnerability that the tiny deer innately elicits is heightened with our own sense of personal safety.
It is not the case that Siopis speaks only of her personal history. Shadow Shame Again (2021) is dedicated to Tshegofatso Pule, murdered by her partner whilst eight months pregnant. The descriptive text explains that there is a “pandemic” of femicide in South Africa, exacerbated during the 2020 Covid lockdown period. The film does not depict actual images of Pule, rather it is a montage of found footage of women – calling on Siopis’ praxis to use found footage. It is this compilation, poetic yet tense, that gives the sense of the vulnerability of women like Pule.
I wonder how the Greek Museum’s visitors perceive this depiction of South African history. My question is answered by the numerous visitors who stop Siopis with comments that seem personal. For example, there is the middle-aged man and his elderly companion who, laughingly, tell Siopis that their houses look like her work, Charmed Lives (1998-99), which is made up of a collection of seemingly disparate objects hung in an expansive tableau. There is a South African military uniform, a child’s red galoshes, a pair of worn ice skates, a vuvuzela and a coco-de-mer fruit adjacent to a faded Madonna icon – not to mention the numerous small trinkets. It is clear what the visitors mean, for who among us does not have a store of such objects? So even as Siopis’s art speaks of a personal and South African history, it strikes a universal chord. For the Greek nation, there are millennia of violence, repressions and wars to recall – most recently of civil war from 1946 to 1949. Who among us does not fear our Pinky Pinkies? Who among us does not hold memory in objects?
The laughing man becomes serious and re-phrases his question: “How can you put the objects in [such] a coherent way?” And this brings me back to Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. For Benjamin, history is one great maelstrom and the individual has little agency. Siopis’ art addresses historical events and the resultant shame, horror and loss, but even as the work criticises such events, they also recognise that they shape an individual’s sense of self. It is as if Siopis’ works sweep up some of the chaotic detritus of history into piles of tenderly personal coherency. In acknowledging that they are her own dear piles, her art invites others to recognise and assemble their own, to find agency not despite but because of history. To recognise that we are all angels of histories – of the greater global, of our people’s, as well as our own.