Mary Sibande (b.1982) is one of South Africa’s most notable contemporary artists, which makes it all the more surprising that this is her first solo exhibition in the UK.
Sibande calls herself a sculptor but she is also a very good photographer. In fact she mainly works with fabric, sewing her own fabric-based sculpture, and the friend I visited the exhibition with described her as a fabulous seamstress – hence, presumably, the show’s title, I Came Apart at the Seams.
For Sibande hit upon an idea early on in her career and has been producing variations on it for over a decade. The idea was to create life-size mannequins of herself, except
- imagined as an alter-ego or avatar, who she named Sophie
- to pose these sculptures in striking postures and activities
- and to dress them in elaborate, sometimes fantastical, almost science-fiction garments
Over the years she’s used this simple-sounding idea to produce some quite simply staggering works of art. I’m amazed she’s not better known and hasn’t been snapped up by one of the major galleries. This is a FREE exhibition at Somerset House so if you’re passing along the Embankment or through Covent Garden it’s well worth making a detour to visit.
Blue
Long Live The Dead Queen (2008 to 2013) was the series in which we first met Sibande’s avatar, Sophie, conceived as a domestic servant – as Sibande’s mother and grandmother were before her. In various iterations Sophie is seen either as a sculpture or in enormous crystal-clear digital photos, transforming her servant costume (in one iteration she is embroidering the Superman logo onto it) in a series of dreams of escaping her lowly status and gender.
I Put A Spell On Me by Mary Sibande (2009)
Purple
Sibande’s next series was titled The Purple Shall Govern (2013 to 2017). In these Sophie is embodied as ‘The Purple Figure’.
The title is a play on words, making two references, mashing up the opening principle of the 1955 Freedom Charter of the African National Congress stated that ‘The People Shall Govern!’ – with the 1989 anti-apartheid Purple Rain protests.
During these, thousands of anti-apartheid protesters marched on the parliament building in Cape Town and the police sprayed the protesters with water cannon marked with purple dye so that they could be identified and arrested later. However, some of the marchers got their hands on the water cannon and turned it back onto the police and authorities, spraying them and thus symbolically equalising everyone.
Anyway, in Sibande’s hands the colour purple is the inspiration for a series of absolutely wild photos and fabric-sculptures, in which the Sophie figure is transfigured into a force of nature out of whose body and clothes and hair, wild dreadlocks or roots or tendrils cascade and explode in a twirling confusion.
A Terrible Beauty is Born (Long Live The Dead Queen series) by Mary Sibande (2013) Copyright the artist
The above is an enormous digital print which is a) of wonderful clarity and precision b) printed onto fabric not paper and hung across one whole wall and c) is totally wild.
The po-faced seriousness of the political commentary on her works – the references to apartheid and this or that protest – in no way prepares you for the wild, crazed, science fiction pullulation of her imaginings.
It is extravagant, operatic – dreams, nightmares or visions on an epic scale and all the more weird and compelling for having been made, created, carefully and time-consumingly sewn out of fabric.
One entire room in the show consists of an absolutely amazing piece of sculpture – the black woman Sophie wrapped in purple fabric, while her hair appears to be exploding backwards into a huge tangled skein which is itself intertwining to form something like the roots of a tree. It is as if the human being is metamorphosing into an awesome, phantasmagorical force of nature.
It’s one of the weirdest and most powerful works of art I’ve ever seen.
A Reversed Retrogress Scene 2 by Mary Sibande (2013)
Red
Sibande’s latest series is titled In The Midst of Chaos There Is Also Opportunity (2017-ongoing). In these Sophie has transformed into ‘The Red Figure’ – red to express the collective disillusionment and anger of many South Africans at the enduring poverty in post-apartheid South Africa.
So blood-red is for anger, but also the power to heal and restore – there’s something of the priestess and healer in the Red Figure. She is sad, she is angry – but she is also empowered by the legacy and memory of all those who gave their lives to overthrow apartheid.
Come, you spirits of the land and the skies by Mary Sibande (2019)
As I say, the commentators, the curators, and Sibande herself, are happy to describe her art in terms of South Africa’s apartheid and post-apartheid history, the struggle for liberation and the long disappointment that came afterwards, and so on.
Maybe that’s where her art starts. But in my opinion where it goes to is somewhere altogether different, somewhere weird, strange and entrancing, to a zone which is disturbing, upsetting, amazing and supremely memorable.
Look closely and you’ll see that Sophie’s eyes, in all her reincarnations, are always closed: she is dreaming, according to the curators, dreaming of freedom and equality etc.
But the way I read it, Sophie is having dreams far bigger than paltry ones about politics and justice – dreams which are far more disruptive and uncontrolled and weird and enthralling, about human nature itself.
A Terrible Beauty and A Reversed Retrogress show humanity morphing into something much bigger and more cosmic than petty concerns about this or that cause or country – in them the purple and red figures are becoming cosmic, entwining with the natural world, seizing power and going beyond the human into an extraordinary new realm of the imagination.
Related links
- Mary Sibande continues at Somerset House until 5 January and is FREE
- Review in Griotmag
- South Africa: The art of a nation @ the British Museum (December 2016)
Books & Boots 