Mario Todeschini
Created over three years, "Shame" is a series of 165 paintings by South African artist Penny Siopis, depicting scenes of regret, guilt and disappointment. Now, nearly two decades after she began the series, she has revisited "Shame" in a digital artwork. Scroll through to learn more about Siopis and her work.
Mario Todeschini
Born in the 1950s, Siopis grew up during apartheid, South Africa's period of legislated segregation. The "momentous changes of the country" fundamentally shaped her art, said Siopis, and "Shame" was created in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- a government body established to investigate human rights violations that took place during apartheid.
Mario Todeschini
Siopis says the Truth and Reconciliation Commission raised questions about individual complicity in apartheid, which she wanted to explore in the series.
Mario Todeschini
Siopis used lacquer and oil paint to create a "distressed" look, along with watercolor, paper varnish, glue, and random objects, such as stick-on eyes and phrases from rubber stamps she found in a children's craft store.
Mario Todeschini
The series also explores "intimate imaginings of childhood sexuality and dread," and Siopis delves into the "psychosocial and psychosexual" elements of shame.
Mario Todeschini
Shame is a universal emotion that plays out both privately and publicly, said Siopsis, and she explores how that conflict adds to its toxicity.
Mario Todeschini
First shown partially in 2003 in a solo exhibition in Johannesburg and Athens, the series was most recently showcased in full at Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town in March 2021, for Art Basel's "Online Viewing Rooms: Pioneers."
Mario Todeschini
In 2021, Siopis revisited the theme of shame in a six-minute video in response to increased gender-based violence in South Africa. The film (pictured), created with 8-millimeter and 16-millimeter home videos Siopis purchased at flea markets, is dedicated to Tshegofatso Pule, a 28-year-old pregnant woman whose murder in June 2020 started national protests.
Mario Todeschini
While Siopis says shame is a "toxic" feeling, she believes it is also the foundation of empathy, and hopes that through her works, people can find a better understanding of others, and South Africa.
CNN  — 

Growing up in South Africa in the 1950s and ’60s, it was inevitable that Penny Siopis’ work would be political.

The multimedia artist was born during apartheid, South Africa’s period of legislated segregation, and began her career in the 1980s when anti-apartheid activist (and later president) Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. The “momentous changes of the country” fundamentally shaped her art, said Siopis.

“You’re not just painting or making work about the empirical changes that you witness, but actually the psychological changes,” she said.

Siopis expressed some of those psychological changes in her series “Shame.” Comprising 165 paintings created over three years between 2002 and 2005, Siopis said the series was a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a government body established to investigate human rights violations that took place during apartheid – that explored the “questions around culpability, vulnerability and shame that the Commission raised.”

Mario Todeschini
"Shame" (2002-2005) comprises 165 small, tile-size paintings exploring themes of guilt, trauma and grief.

Now, nearly two decades after starting on the series, Siopis revisited “Shame” earlier this year in a digital art work, examining gender-based violence in South Africa.

The psychology of shame

Dynamic, abstract figures dominate the paintings in shades of orange and red, contrasted against the sharp white background. Siopis used lacquer and oil paint to create a “distressed” and “agitated” look, along with phrases from rubber stamps she found in a children’s craft store.

Shame is a universal emotion that plays out both privately and publicly, said Siopis. It’s that dichotomy that she delves into in each tile-sized painting. Examining the “complicity” of the individual in apartheid South Africa, Siopis tries to give form to the mental and emotional turmoil of the period – and the scars it left behind.

CNN
Artist Penny Siopis (pictured) explores trauma and feelings of shame through her paintings.

“I think people in the larger world are very interested in South Africa being a kind of microcosm of social-political experiences across the globe, but they often don’t have the sense of what it is: the psychological complexity of what it might mean to have lived in a society like ours, and still live in a society like ours,” said Siopis.

Shame revisited

Revisiting the topic earlier this year, Siopis zeroed in on the “psychosexual” element of shame. “Shadow Shame Again” is a six-minute digital film created during the coronavirus pandemic, as South Africa reckons with what its president Cyril Ramaphosa calls “another pandemic”: violence against women. Gender-based violence has been on the rise in South Africa in the past year, with the country already having one of the highest rates of rape in the world.

Mario Todeschini
Siopis used lacquer, glue, varnish, oil and watercolor paint, as well as an assortment of "found" objects, including stick-on eyes and rubber stamps from a children's craft store.

Using “found footage” – fragments of 8mm and 16mm film Siopis bought at flea markets – the film was commissioned by the Peltz Gallery in the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London.

Splicing together home video footage of women and girls against words and music, the video is dedicated to Tshegofatso Pule, a 28-year-old pregnant woman whose murder in June 2020 started national protests. “The mental image became a rallying cry in protest, and a locus of national shame,” Siopis writes in the film.

While shame is a “toxic” feeling, Siopis believes it is also the foundation of empathy. “(People) find in these artworks a space to imagine what it might have been like, and what it might be like in South Africa, rather than just to take the given media narrative,” she said.

Taking the viewer “beyond the empirical or statistical,” Siopis hopes her art can spark conversations and create a new story for South Africa.

“We’re often afraid of change,” she said. “It always amazed me when people said under apartheid, ‘Oh, we can’t change overnight.’ Well, what the pandemic has said is yes, you change overnight: you can, we all do, it’s possible. And this is the global change. I embrace change, and I think my medium, the way I work with the medium, somehow gives a physical form to that embrace.”