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It is a monumental installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, France. The artist, Mary Sibande, will celebrate her 40th birthday in April. Her international career is already impressive and makes her an essential visual artist on the African continent.
There is Mary Sibande, a little girl in Barbeton, ” five hours drive east of Johannesburg who dreamed of becoming a stylist, and there is her alter ego, “Sophie”, the archetype of the black servant during apartheid, a profession handed down from mother to daughter, up to the one who, when she became an adult, became an artist for testify to it.
From 2008, “Sophie”, whose body and face are molded on those of Mary Sibande, dons the blue dresses of domestic workers, but transfigured by lace, crinolines, trains reminiscent of the Victorian costume of white women, a transgression social and racial that she allows herself to dream with her eyes closed, to shake up the inertia of the world.
« Purple will rule »
Then in 2013, at the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale in particular, blue gave way to purple, another color to tell the story of oppression. During a freedom march in Cape Town in September 1989, police sprayed purple on the clothes and bodies of demonstrators, to better identify them. Thus appeared the slogan ” The purple shall govern » [le violet gouvernera] which plays on neighboring sounds between purple and people [le peuple].
« For me, purple is the color of privileges and I intend to take advantage of them because they are available to me thanks to those who fought for them. explains Mary Sibande. His double thus moves away little by little from the initial historical and social referent to conquer his autonomy. The dreamer, her eyes still closed, surrounds herself with fantastic creatures to which she seems to have given birth.
« Our initial idea was to retrace this journey in what would have been his first retrospective, explains Matthieu Lelièvre, exhibition curator. This was to take place in 2020. Circumstances led us to opt for a single installation of unprecedented proportions, in a 500 square meter room. »
witch and priestess
« In 2016, continues Matthieu Lelièvre, something ended with the transition to purple. We are less and less in direct social commentary. The red that was already appearing in the folds of clothing has become dominant, and it is this that we find in the work presented to the public.
Sophie has changed into a witch, her hands draw on the screen of a shadow theater the mouth of a dog on the lookout. All around, on the steps of a wooden amphitheater, other dogs seem to spring from red clay like so many chthonian creatures. You would think they were barking or growling, jaws gaping, when some were caught just when their bodies still seemed to be forming.
« We thought regarding the temporality of the work, comments the commissioner, and therefore to a soundtrack. We hear the voice of the artist and a disturbing musical background. I believe that the idea of the ventriloquist was born at that time. Her dress stretches towards the exit in a long train which gradually takes on the appearance of a wave, a memory ofHokusai.
The Red Dogs of Anger
« Red dogs of anger are a classic image of Zulu culture “, explains Matthieu Lelièvre. If the phantasmagoria is impressive, the political referent is more present than ever. The pandemic has shaken South Africa and further widened the social gap between blacks and whites. The summer of 2021 was marked by real riots. The end of apartheid did not profoundly change economic inequalities, despite the appearance of a black middle class.
In an intersectional approach, who better than a black woman from the working class can appease anger and understand the reasons. This is essentially what Mary Sibande confides to us, her eyes still closed not to the world, but to what, precisely, would mask its harmony.
And if the visitor lingers on the features of the ventriloquist, slightly camouflaged by heavy red mats, he will see a soft smile, deep and peaceful. This smile is that of the artist, who knows nothing of the pain that surrounds her, nor of the thunderbolts that they can engender.
► Exposition Mary Sibande, the red ventriloquist, from February 11 to July 10, 2022, at Mac Lyon. Exhibition curator: Matthieu Lelièvre. Wednesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
► For further:
► Mary Sibande in residence at Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine in 2013.
► African culture the meetings in February 2022.
► South Africa: thirty years following Apartheid, the difficult generational transmission.