Notes

In 1986, during a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Penny Siopis unsuccessfully tried to gain access to a museum storeroom to view Sara Baartman’s remains. The artist’s interest was sincere, not voyeuristic or macabre. Following her postgraduate studies at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1979, Siopis’s art began to materialise her political interests and feminist concerns. The present lot from 1990 is an expression of this developmental journey. In particular, it reflects her growing understanding of history and biography as closely intertwined. In short, Baartman’s story is also South Africa’s story.

After nearly three decades in South Africa, where she was a mother and workingwoman, Baartman spent the last five years of her life in Europe as a curiosity for display. Even after her death, in 1815, Baartman continued to be exhibited, notably at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris. In 1937 she was moved to Musée de l'Homme, opposite the Eiffel Tower.¹ Returning to Paris in 1988, this time armed with a letter from her Wits University colleague, the eminent paleoanthropologist Phillip Tobias, Siopis was able to see Baartman – or at least a representation of her.²

The museum’s personnel couldn’t find Baartman’s physical remains, so presented Siopis with her full body cast, which the artist photographed. From 1988, Baartman began to figure in various drawings and paintings by the artist. Notable among these is a companion work to this lot, Dora and the Other Woman (1989), a work linking Baartman’s story with Freud’s 1905 case study of Dora. It too depicts a female figure swathed in white with illustrations of Baartman pinned to her garment. However, this lot more fully articulates Siopis’s critique of colonial spectatorship and the male gaze. Narrated from the perspective of a possibly male figure, the work contains many of the defining hallmarks of Siopis’s work from this period, notably her use of distorted perspectives and rich impasto surface treatments.

The various pictorial elements (photos, classical statue, the habitat of an artist’s studio) further connect this lot to the works Siopis made in the later 1980s engaged with collapsing hierarchies, exposed histories and the possibility of historical redress. For Baartman, redress finally occurred when, in 2002, her remains were returned to South Africa for burial at Hankey in the Eastern Cape. Thousands of people attended her burial.

1. Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully (2009) Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2. Penny Siopis (2014) ‘Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier’, in Time and Again, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, page 64.

Literature

Jennifer Sorrell (ed.) (1992) ADA, special issue on Johannesburg, illustrated in colour on page 107, title of the work given as ‘Representations’ and dated 1989.

Warren Siebrits (2003) Origins of Form, Sculpture and Artefacts from Southern Africa, in the chapter ‘Witness', n.p., illustrated in colour, title of the work given as ‘Passim’ and dated 1990.