{"id":88984,"date":"2024-05-10T14:32:42","date_gmt":"2024-05-10T14:32:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/?p=88984"},"modified":"2025-06-03T14:15:57","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T14:15:57","slug":"penny-siopis-for-dear-life-a-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/exhibitions-en\/penny-siopis-for-dear-life-a-retrospective","title":{"rendered":"PENNY SIOPIS. FOR DEAR LIFE. A RETROSPECTIVE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exhibitions cycle: WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD? Part 3
\n<\/strong>
\n\u0395\u039c\u03a3\u03a4 is pleased to present For Dear Life. A Retrospective<\/em>, 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?<\/em>, a year-long cycle of exhibitions centred on women artists and artists who identify as female.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For Dear Life. A Retrospective<\/em> features work from each of Siopis\u2019 major series, including the Cake<\/em> (1980\u20131984) and History<\/em> (1985\u20131995) paintings, Will<\/em> (1997\u2013), and Pinky Pinky<\/em> (2002\u20132005), 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\u00a0 includes Will<\/em> (1997- ) a monumental, autobiographical conceptual work-in-progress which will only be completed on the artist\u2019s 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<\/em> is an installation that includes over 700 objects that provide insight into the artist\u2019s collecting habits and interests \u2013 artistic and vernacular \u00a0\u2013 \u00a0but 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of 400 pages. Texts by: Sinazo Chiya, Katerina Gregou, William Kentridge, Achille Mbembe, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Griselda Pollock, Laura Rascaroli, Olga Speakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exhibitions cycle: WHAT IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD? Part 3 \u0395\u039c\u03a3\u03a4 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":88975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-exhibition-post.php","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[195,35,34],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88984"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92171,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88984\/revisions\/92171"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emst.gr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}