Athens, February 6- It is a winter evening at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST). One day after her birthday, Penny Siopis stands before a captivated audience in a packed yet intimate room, reflecting on her 72 years. Many kilometers away from her home in South Africa, she is here to present her retrospective exhibition, For Dear Life—a body of work that has earned a place among Frieze magazine’s top 10 exhibitions of 2024.

Students, journalists, art lovers, and curious visitors gather, eager to hear from the artist herself. Welcomed by Katerina Gregou, EMST’s artistic director and curator of the exhibition, Siopis takes the stage—not just to present her work, but to share her story.

A Family Story

Siopis, known for her historically and culturally charged works that critique colonialism, apartheid, racism, and sexism, chooses to begin her presentation with a black-and-white photo of a family bakery. The bakery, she explains, was attached to their home in Vryburg, a town in the North West Province of South Africa, where her Greek parents had settled.

Penny Siopis Obscure White Messenger, 2010 Single-channel digital video, 15’ 7″ © Penny Siopis Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam.

Speaking to the engaged audience, she shares that her father was Greek, born in Thessaloniki, and came to South Africa via Egypt during World War II. He had been fighting in the Greek forces when he contracted tuberculosis and was sent from Alexandria to a British-run hospital in Johannesburg for recovery. It was there that he met her mother, the daughter of a Greek entrepreneur from Andros, who had established an Anglo-Hellenic film company.

Penny Siopis, Obscure White Messenger, 2010, Single-channel digital video, 15’ 7″, © Penny Siopis, Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

The Cake Paintings

Penny Siopis. For Dear Life. A Retrospective
Installation view at ΕΜΣΤ
Photo by Paris Tavitian

The retrospective, spanning over 40 years of work, begins with Siopis’ Cake Paintings (1980–1984), directly inspired by the bakery of her childhood. Using the same tools her mother used to decorate cakes, she sculpted thick impasto surfaces of oil paint, allowing them to dry unevenly. The result—wrinkled, cracked, and oozing—challenges conventional ideals of female beauty. The materiality of paint itself becomes an evolving metaphor for the passage of time and the vulnerability of the human body.

Penny Siopis. For Dear Life. A Retrospective
Installation view at ΕΜΣΤ
Photo by Paris Tavitian

Glue and Ink Paintings: Material as Metaphor

Though Siopis never abandoned her fascination with paint as a physical substance, she later expanded her practice to include glue and ink. In these works, the medium is not merely a passive substance but an active agent in the creation process.

Penny Siopis. For Dear Life. A Retrospective, Installation view at ΕΜΣΤ, Photo by Paris Tavitian

“What happens when ink and glue act on a surface is unpredictable and exciting,” Siopis explains. “This unpredictability creates a certain tension of energy between form and formlessness, balancing them on a knife edge.”

The mixing and pouring of ink, glue, and water create fluid, uncontrolled patterns, reflecting both personal transformation and broader social change.

Penny Siopis, For Dear Life, 2020, Glue and ink on canvas, 190 x 90 cm,
Private Collection, Cape Town 
© Penny Siopis,
Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam

Shame Paintings: Apartheid and Trauma

Penny Siopis, Shame, 2021 (detail), Installation | 182 paintings, Mirror paint, oil, enamel, glue, watercolour, paper varnish and found
objects on paper, © Penny Siopis, Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam.

Siopis’ work is inextricably linked to the political landscape of South Africa. Inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established in 1996 to address human rights violations during apartheid, she created the Shame Paintings. These works, composed of a grid of small paintings, explore the themes of sexuality, shame, and collective trauma.

“Under apartheid, the position of being white and privileged also made a responsibility, if you were a progressive artist,” Siopis states. “It meant that you were to use your privilege to expose the injustices that happened.”

For this series, Siopis used thick lacquer gel paint, a material often used in home-crafts for stained glass and mirror effects. Embedded within the paintings are rubber-stamped messages, reinforcing the role of language and the difficulty of articulating shame.

“Shame is considered the most visceral of emotions. We die of shame because we feel exposed and sense the terror of being looked at. Shame is born in childhood and revisits us in adult life in ways we cannot control. As much as shame is pain, it also offers the grounds for empathy, encouraging us to recognize shame in others and empathize with situations not immediately our own.”

The Living Archive: Objects as Memory

A defining aspect of Siopis’ practice is her installation work, composed of carefully arranged objects drawn from her personal collection and presented in ever-changing configurations.

“I was always interested in objects as carriers of meanings beyond themselves,” she reflects, viewing them as physical traces of time, personal lives, and broader social histories.

Penny Siopis Charmed Lives, 1998-99 (detail) Installation of found objects Courtesy of the artist Photo by Mar Efstathiadi

These objects migrate from one installation to another, forming an ever-evolving archive. Siopis compares this process to her use of film—an ephemeral art form where objects are continuously rearranged, taken down, and reassembled, much like paint in a tube waiting for its next use.

Among her most notable installation projects is Charmed Lives (1999), first created for the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York. Here, hundreds of objects accumulate layers of emotions and meanings, shaped by both the artist and the audience.

Penny Siopis, Charmed Lives, 1998-99, Installation of found objects, Courtesy of the artist, Photo by Paris Tavitian

“One thing nestled next to another or dropped over another, creating countless relationships,” Siopis describes, highlighting the fluid connections between objects, spaces, and the stories they evoke.

Diaspora and Dispersal: Will (1997–)

For the final part of her presentation, Siopis introduces Will (1997–), an autobiographical project in which she selects objects from her vast collection and bequeaths them to individuals worldwide. This ongoing work functions as an archive of personal and collective history, reflecting on themes of diaspora and identity.

Penny Siopis. For Dear Life. A Retrospective
Installation view at ΕΜΣΤ
Photo by Paris Tavitian

Penny Siopis. For Dear Life. A Retrospective
Installation view at ΕΜΣΤ
Photo by Paris Tavitian

“It’s like a dispersed personhood. Because that’s what happens—we put the collection together, then it gets dispersed all over the world, and it goes back to where it was. Perhaps because all these objects came before me, before most of us, and they outlive us.”

Bringing the discussion to the broader experience of diaspora, she adds:

 “Obviously, the diaspora is a subject position of dispersed subjectivity, and I’m curious about that in a way that’s not to make an image of it, but to have a performative action—not me performing it, but the objects in relationship to whoever receives it performing it.”

Siopis’s retrospective at EMST is part of the museum’s exhibition cycle What If Women Ruled the World?, dedicated to women artists and those who identify as female. Running from December 2023 to January 2025, the series celebrates the contributions of women in contemporary art, providing a powerful platform for voices often overlooked.

As For Dear Life comes to an end on February 16, it leaves behind an indelible mark on the Athens art scene.