Penny Siopis
News
Penny Siopis has been selected for the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, a group exhibition titled Imaginary Fact: South African art and the archive (1 June - 24 November). Her Obscure White Messenger can be seen on Appropriated Landscapes at the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany, until May 2013.
Exhibitions / Works
- Skirmishes on Fiction as Fiction (Or, A Ninth Johannesburg Biennale) (Cape Town, 2012)
- The Master is Drowning on Trade Routes Over Time (Cape Town, 2012)
- New paintings on What we talk about when we talk about love (Cape Town, 2011)
- Who's Afraid of the Crowd? (Cape Town, 14 April - 21 May 2011)
- Furies (Johannesburg, 5 August - 18 September 2010)
- Obscure White Messenger on This is Our Time (Cape Town, 3 June - 24 July 2010)
- New paintings (Joburg Art Fair, 26-28 March 2010)
- Paintings (Cape Town, 16 April - 30 May 2009)
- Recent works on Self/Not-self (Johannesburg, 26 March - 25 April 2009)
- Ambush on Disguise (Cape Town, 15 May - 5 July 2008)
- Lasso (Cape Town, 20 September - 20 October 2007)
- Feral Fables on Afterlife (Cape Town, 22 March - 8 April 2007)
Publications
- Trade Routes Revisited (2012)
- Who's Afraid of the Crowd? (2011)
- Paintings (2009)
- Lasso (2007)
Biography
Penny Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg, South Africa. She has an MFA from Rhodes University, Grahamstown (1976), and is an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She works in painting, photography, film/video and installation. Her work since the 1970s has covered different foci but her interest in what she calls the 'poetics of vulnerability' characterises all her explorations, from her earlier engagements with history, memory and migration to her later concerns with shame, violence and sexuality. She has exhibited widely, both in South Africa and internationally. Solo exhibitions include the curated show Red: The iconography of colour in the work of Penny Siopis at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009), and Three Essays on Shame at the Freud Museum, London (2005). She has taken part in the biennales of Sydney (2010), Johannesburg (1995 and 1997), Gwangju (1997), Havana (1995) and Venice (1993).
Full CV