In 2009, when Mary Sibande was seen posing in a domestic worker's uniform, viewers were shocked, annoyed even. As one of the first university graduates in her family, she had escaped the legacy of servitude that had haunted her ancestors.
In her solo exhibition Long Live the Dead Queen, at Gallery Momo in Parktown North, Johannesburg, she had reinterpreted this symbol of oppression. In staged photographs and mannequin-like sculptures she was depicted wearing her adapted version with flourishes from the late Victorian era. Puffed sleeves and layers of petticoats supported elaborate ruched skirts and elevated the status of the wearer to that of a queen.
It was a stroke of genius. Her artful subversion of this politically loaded uniform tapped into the swirl of contradictions in the post-apartheid era.This hybrid "maid's outfit" summed up this awkward political transition, in which people were caught between the past and the present, and how the euphoria of freedom dovetailed into black middle-class aspirations. The domestic worker was pictured becoming the "madam". Most important, Sibande turned this lowly figure, viewed as the most vulnerable and exploited in our society, into one to be venerated rather than pitied. There was a personal payoff for Sibande too; this transitional character that looked like her but was named after her grandmother Sophie had been "liberated" - and made world-famous in the process.
TRAVELLED THE WORLD
Sophie has travelled the world and lives in collections in some of the most important museums such as the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington. The Smithsonian also awarded Sibande its African Artist Award at a recent gala event.
Sibande has continued to evolve Sophie, changing her into new characters; using outfits, she plays with the aspirations of a new "free" nation.Sibande's rise to success does not follow the rags-to-riches story. She attended an Afrikaans school, which allowed her to receive a better education than other children in the township where she lived. This isolated her from some of her peers. "People thought that I believed I was better than them because I went to this other school," she recalled.
In a way her art deals with this sense of longing for equality, but also the uneasy social status or state between having it all and being linked to a legacy of servitude. Within the art world she has found a firm place to plant her feet.
She has remained with Gallery Momo, one of the only black-owned commercial galleries, since her career took off in 2009. She comfortably settled into the Joburg art scene, having shared a home with fellow artist Lawrence Lemaoana in the legendary August House in Doornfontein, where many artists live and work.Sibande started out as a frustrated clothing designer. After learning that her application to study fashion at the University of Johannesburg was late, she opted to study fine art in 2001. Yet the works she exhibited early on were clothing accessories. It wasn't until she created elaborate hybrid outfits fusing domestic uniforms with Victorian attire that she got noticed.
Encapsulating the notion that liberation was tied to conspicuous consumption, the outfits grew more elaborate over time. I Decline, I Refuse to Recline (2010) features a dress with a psychiatrist's couch attached to it.
Sophie's eyes remain closed in all the works. She was as locked in her dreamscape as she was stuck in her apron. Was freedom but a dream?
'COLOUR IS IMPORTANT IN SA'
When giant blow-ups of Sophie covered inner-city buildings as part of the 2011 Joburg Art City Project, Sibande came to the attention of the wider public in South Africa.
The year 2013 marked a shift in her art. The Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, which provides a healthy purse to create a new body of work, saw her enter a new phase, defined by a new colour: purple. "Colour is important in South Africa. Everything we do is based on colour," says Sibande.
The Purple Shall Govern exhibition saw Sophie's white apron in the process of being removed from scenes, signalling that this figure trapped in domesticity and servitude was slipping out of sight.
Before the "transition" or state of liberation is completed, a battle between the older and newer generations takes place, as depicted in the installation work A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1 (2013), in which Sophie fights the new character in a purple dress.
The odd purple creatures depicted emerging from this new character's belly, curling around her, suggest that the dream of liberation has taken over reality. This new nation was evolving into a strange animal that no one recognised.Fittingly, the new commissioned work for the inaugural exhibition at Zeitz Mocaa coincided with Sibande entering another phase, marked by a new colour: red, an expression of anger...