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ΕΜΣΤ is pleased to present For Dear Life. A Retrospective, the first major museum retrospective in Europe of the work of Penny Siopis, one of the most important artistic voices of her generation. The exhibition is the flagship event of the third part of What If Women Ruled the World?, a year-long cycle of exhibitions centred on women artists and artists who identify as female.

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Born in South Africa in 1953 to Greek parents, Siopis came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with her historically and culturally charged paintings that exercised a fierce critique against colonialism, apartheid, racism and sexism. She went on to experiment with other media such as installation and film, creating a rich, incisive and poignant body of work that has consistently engaged with the persistence and fragility of memory, notions of truth and accountability, the rights of women and the disenfranchised, the issue of vulnerability, and the complex entanglements of personal and collective histories.

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For Dear Life. A Retrospective features work from each of Siopis’ major series, including the Cake (1980–1984) and History (1985–1995) paintings, Will (1997–), and Pinky Pinky (2002–2005), as well as a number of her celebrated experimental films, which combine found footage with personal archives and texts to produce poignant meditations on the political, personal and historical cornerstones that marked her life, and that of her home country also, during a time of socio-political change and rights-based struggles in South Africa and beyond. Furthermore, the exhibition  includes Will (1997- ) a monumental, autobiographical conceptual work-in-progress which will only be completed on the artist’s death. As part of this work, Siopis bequeaths a diverse collection of objects to beneficiaries of her choice: friends, family, collaborators from all over the globe. Will is an installation that includes over 700 objects that provide insight into the artist’s collecting habits and interests – artistic and vernacular  –  but also into her own personal history and experience, rooted in its own particular time, place and circumstance. The public will have the opportunity to discover a rich oeuvre in which there exists a perfect and meaningful balance between content and form. For the artist, materiality and process are inseparable from concept, meaning and ideas.

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For 50 years Siopis has explored the politics of the body, grief and shame as they play out in her home country, South Africa. In the process she has established herself as one of the most important artistic voices of her generation on the African continent and beyond.

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Biography :

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Penny Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg, South Africa, and lives in Cape Town. She has an MFA and an Honorary Doctorate from Rhodes University, and is an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

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Institutional solo exhibitions include 1997 Ongoing, Michaelis Galleries, University of Cape Town (2023); Moving Stories and Travelling Rhythms: Penny Siopis and the Many Journeys of Skokiaan, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo (2019); ‘This is a True Story’: Six Films (1997-2017), Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2018); Penny Siopis: Films, Erg Gallery, Brussels (2016); Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014), and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2015); Red: The Iconography of Colour in the Work of Penny Siopis, KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009), and Three Essays on Shame, Freud Museum, London (2005).

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Notable group exhibitions include Trace – Formations of Likeness: Photography and Video from The Walther Collection, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023); Enduring Circumstances, Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck University of London (2022); Shifting Dialogues: Photography from The Walther Collection, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2022); Plural Possibilities and the Female Body, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (2021); Global(e) Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Indian Ocean Current, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, MA (2020); I Am … Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2019); The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017); All Things Being Equal, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2017); South Africa: The Art of a Nation, British Museum, London (2016); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Prism: Drawing from 1990-2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Appropriated Landscapes, The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany (2011); Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body, Hood Museum, NH; Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; and San Diego Museum of Art, CA (2008); Africas: The Artist and the City, Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona (2001); Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Museum for African Art, NY; Austin Museum of Art, TX; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA; University of Arizona Gallery, Tucson (1999); and the biennales of Taipei (2016), Venice (1993, South African Pavilion 2013), Sydney (2010), Guangzhou (2008), Johannesburg (1995 and 1997), Gwangju (1997) and Havana (1994 and 1997).

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Siopis is the recipient of many awards, including a British Council Scholarship, the Atelier Award for a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the Alexander S Onassis fellowship for research in Greece, residencies at Delfina and the Gasworks in London, Civitelli Ranieri in Umbria, the Tropen Museum in Amsterdam, Ampersand in New York, and a Lucas Artists Residency at Montalvo Arts Center in California.

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Her work is in the collections of Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg; University of South Africa (Unisa); Johannesburg Art Gallery; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Gqeberha; William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberly; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, among others.