For Dear Life will feature the latest works from the ongoing painting installation series, Viscous Worlds (2017-present), Atlas (2020-present) and a selection of solo canvases exemplifying Siopis’ long-term engagement with the notion, ‘the poetics of vulnerability’: a philosophically materialist and choreographic confluence of gesture, thought and response to cultural and environmental phenomena taking place globally, and specifically in South Africa.
Siopis’ selected materials for her paintings include: glue, ink, and at later stages oil paint. Beginning with the canvas placed horizontally on the floor and working from its edges, Siopis pours and guides glue on the surface, adding ink and letting the substances flow, coalesce or at its own momentum draw off from the canvas. These abstract flows dry translucent and cohere a visual language that corresponds to readings of current events.
This sensibility transfers itself to Siopis’ films sourced from disparate sections of found 16 or 8mm home movies, which, when edited together, form a visual dissonance between what is seen, what is possible, and what is read of events and their meaning on and potentially off screen and in life. For Dear Life will include the moving image work, She Breathes Water (2019).
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg, South Africa, and lives in Cape Town, where she is currently an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
Her work since the early 1980s has encompassed painting, film/video, photography and installation. All her explorations, whether with body politics, memory, migration, or the relations between the human and non-human, are characterised by her interest in what she calls the ‘poetics of vulnerability’ – embodied in the dynamic play between materiality and reference, chance and contingency, form and formlessness, personal and collective history.
