Browsing by Subject "Mary Sibande"

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"Sophie" reigns over dominant display practices : negotiating power in Mary Sibande's installations
(2012-05) Singer, Alison Elizabeth; Okediji, Moyosore B. (Moyosore Benjamin); Chambers, Edward
Mary Sibande's Long Live the Dead Queen series is an on-going installation in the Johannesburg art gallery, MOMO. The subject of this series, Sophie, is a life-sized corporeal presence; she is Sibande's alter-ego cast from Sibande's own body. A central formal element of Sophie is her costume: a voluminous dress that hybridizes the South African domestic servant's uniform and a Victorian madam's dress. A dress denoting both servitude and dominance, it immediately recalls the colonizer/colonized dialectic between the early British Victorian colonizer and many Black African peoples whom the Victorians consigned to subordination, particularly in South Africa. Sophie is seemingly fixed within this binary power system: her visible identity oscillates between maid and Victorian. Furthermore, her eyes are always downcast so that she initially appears to embrace her subservience. However, I argue that her refusal, or even inability, to acknowledge her surroundings might alternatively demarcate her into a subjective, fantasy space, and one that she necessarily controls. She conflates historical identities that persist in present South African circumstances, so she also denies our ability to locate her within logical time or space, underscoring the notion of fantasy. Within this, Sophie can reclaim agency despite her servitude, performing in various positions of power to resituate dialectical power relationships between dominant/subordinate, master/slave. In other words, the postmodern play of Sophie becomes a postcolonial opposition to subjugation. Throughout each chapter I will apply the psychoanalytic treatment of sublimation in which a socially unacceptable desire, that of a collective or individual, is displaced onto something socially appropriate within the context of that society. I can thus look more closely at the methods by which Sophie draws attention to surreptitious and manipulated power relationships, and the ways she then dislodges these relationships from the power dialectic.
Uncertain times : contingency & Black temporal imaginations
(2022-05-16) Moore, Nathan Alexander; Young, Hershini Bhana; Livermon, Xavier; Smith, Cherise; Walter, Patrick F.; Hill, DaMaris B.
This dissertation is concerned with rethinking spatial temporality through diasporic speculative practices. This dissertation will explore how Black diasporic artists use speculative arts practices to negotiate their relationship to the past. Instead of the past being behind us, these artists insist on reformulating how we think about time to address the lingering presence of past violence that is never gone. I look specifically at Blackness, queerness and non-normative gender formations in order complicate the notion of history and the past that appears in these speculative practices. These speculative practices include visual art, performances and novels from the late 20th to early 21st century to restructure how we think about diasporic place and time. This dissertation will focus on the various theorizations of time that appear in these speculative practices as I think these are essential to articulating how Black artists conceive of time against narratives of linear progression.