Amsterdam

STEVENSON is pleased to present The Blue Blindfold and Other Stories, a solo exhibition by Sosa Joseph – her second with the gallery, following The Hushed History of Oblivion in Cape Town in 2023. She last showed in Amsterdam in 2015 as a participant in the Global Collaborations Program at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau on the Rozenstraat.

From her earliest works, Joseph has adopted a mode of semi-autobiographical storytelling, recapitulating personal anecdotes, regional legends and historical events through painting, shaping their aesthetic slant according to the tenor of her reflections. Where her gallery debut portrayed the stories of individuals subjected to the Indian Ocean slave trade, The Blue Blindfold and Other Stories offers renderings of moments in the domestic arena, meditating on the absurd drama that takes place around us, amplified through our internal imaginings. The artist writes:

I paint from memory – from moments I lived, from observations that lie dormant until the brush wakes them up again. I don’t plan stories when I paint. They just show up. Sometimes it’s the strange theatre of everyday life – the mess, the beauty, the sadness, the small private worlds we live in. A story can come from an overheard conversation, a windowless room, a chaotic moment – a kitchen in a rush, a half-sung profanity song, etc, etc. Colours come by themselves, carrying the feeling of the moment. Paint and layers happen, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident.

Each painting in this body of work exists as a distinct episode, the depicted events unfolding in the parlours, yards and pastures of Kerala, India, where the artist was born and grew up. In works such as The Yellow Cow and Omana, Ola, and the Onth, vignettes from village life are elevated into scenes of mythological portent through the accumulation of details; below the radiant cow and calf of the former, a small bird protects its pair of eggs; in the latter, the micro-interactions of people and animals are as intricately woven across the surface of the canvas as the ‘ola medayal’ – the coconut leaves braided for thatching at its centre.

Other works take place in domestic interiors, the kitchen a stage for the most epic encounters, as in Appams for the in-laws. First pair of heels and the mongoose and Dress-up on a chaotic afternoon seem to tell the same story from different vantage points. A gorgeously adorned seated figure contemplates her new shoes while small creatures, feline, marsupial and humanoid, flit around her. In the alternate version, a fan blows up her skirt while figures engage in domestic tasks or crawl around searching for something lost, all equally absorbed in their own worlds.

This sense of collective reverie is rendered most visibly in The Blue Blindfold, the work central to this exhibition. In her characteristic loose, expressive style, Joseph depicts some figures at the cusp of connection while others appear in contemplation akin to prayer. The fragility of this connection becomes painfully clear too in The Glass Bangles, where the collective gaze turns to judgment as Joseph evokes Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘On the infanticide Marie Farrar’ in which a young woman is condemned, like others the artist can recall, for ‘an act of desperation – killing her child shortly after giving birth’.

Across the stories depicted here, Joseph offers reflection on the everyday solipsism at the root of assumption and projection. She continues, ‘I am trying to recollect how personal and shared dramas play out quietly in everyday life – the stories we all carry without even realising it.’

The opening will take place on Thursday 22 May from 5 to 7pm.