The purple shall govern, the exhibition of work by Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for 2013, Mary Sibande, concludes its national tour at the Standard Bank Gallery.
This exhibition takes Sophie, the elaborately costumed figure for which Sibande is best known, to a new level: a deeper, somewhat darker exploration of personal anxieties and preoccupations with birth, rebirth, growth and death.
As with Sibande’s earlier works, the body of her subject, and particularly the skin and the clothing, becomes the stage where the narrative is played out and ideas, perceptions and feelings are contested or amplified.
Sophie, the complex alter ego through whom Sibande has negotiated the personal narratives of three generations of women in her family, has been portrayed variously as a maid, a lady, a housewife, a religious devotee, a queen, and artist, a horse rider, a soldier and a shopper, amongst other identities. In her many guises, Sophie has served as the vehicle through which Sibande has explored the construction of identity in a post-colonial South African context.
Now Sibande has decided that it’s time to move on, to do something different and, in the process, to ‘let Sophie go’ and allow new ideas to take root and grow.
The transition is dramatically staged. A terrible beauty is born (2013) shows Sophie clothed in purple, being stripped of the white apron and bonnet that symbolise her domestic servitude, by the mass of writhing purple Non-Winged ceiling beings (2013) which extend from her body and garment and to which she appears to be giving birth. Depicted with closed eyes, this ‘new’ Sophie appears to be in a trance, a dreamlike state of transition, occupying a space of uncertainty.
The admiration of the purple figure (2013) reveals a different relation of the subject to the crowd that surrounds her: a moment of welcome and veneration. Although her eyes are still closed, the ‘new’ Sophie looks more at ease, composed and in control, and the creatures that crowd around her feet appear to be looking up in admiration, vying for her attention and rejoicing at her emancipation.
In letting go of Sophie, Sibande has wrestled with the notion of change and the mix of anxiety and liberation it brings. This struggle is evidenced in A reversed retrogress scene 1 (2013), in which we see the ‘old’ Sophie and the ‘new’ in an encounter that is unequivocally tense but veiled in ambiguity.
Viewers who have seen The purple shall govern in galleries in other parts of the country are in for a surprise: new works have been created specifically for the exhibition at Standard Bank Gallery!
Sibande’s new artworks invite viewers to meditate on the meaning of the self in a state of transition, and to wrestle with the internal conflicts that arise in the struggle to let go of the past in order to give birth to new ideas and new identities.
The exhibition is accompanied by an informative and insightful publication edited by Thembinkosi Goniwe.
Courtesy: Gallery Momo, Johannesburg.