Location: South African National Gallery
Current Exhibition closes on January 15, 2014

Mary Sibande is celebrated for her practice in which she employs the human form as a vehicle – through painting and sculpture – to explore the construction of identity in a postcolonial South African context. She attempts to critique stereotypical depictions of (particularly black) women in our society.  Centrally, she looks at the generational disempowerment of black women.  In this sense her work is informed by postcolonial theory, with the domestic setting acting as a stage where historical psycho-dramas play out.

Sibande’s work also highlights how ideals of beauty and femininity inspired black women to discipline their body through rituals of imitation and reproduction. She inverts the social power indexed by Victorian costumes by reconfiguring it as a domestic worker’s “uniform” – adding complex notions to the colonial relationship between “slave” and “master” in a post-apartheid context.

The fabric used to produce uniforms for domestic workers is an instantly recognizable sight in domestic spaces in South Africa. By applying it to Victorian dress, Sibande attempts to make a comment about the history of servitude as it relates to the present.

purplegovern

Event Information

Found via Another Africa