She Breathes Water
Penny Siopis
STEVENSON, Cape Town | Amsterdam
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- Title
- She Breathes Water
- Gallery
- STEVENSON, Cape Town | Amsterdam
- Year
- 2019
- Duration
- 5 min 12 s
- Format & Technical
Video HD, single channel, sound
- Contact
Marc Barben
marc@stevenson.info
A montage of old 8mm found footage, text and sound, the film shapes a story, poetic or fabular, about humanity’s catastrophic imprint on the planet. It starts with a lunar landscape. A flash as a harpoon passes through water. A splash as a man surfaces. A woman swims. She seems angry with history. There are emissions, explosions, extractions, scenes evoking geo-engineering. There is sacrifice. What’s to be done? A creature under the sea offers her ink to help write a history of another kind. ‘Man’ exits the frame. The sound of ice cracking mixes with refrains of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’.
Stills
Penny Siopis vive en Ciudad del Cabo donde ejerce como profesora honoraria en la Michaelis School of Fine Arts. Artista visual que emplea diferentes medios, Siopis desarrolló su primer film en 1997 combinando fragmentos de las películas caseras de 8 mm de su madre con texto y sonido para construir un relato muy personal sobre la migración.
Combina metraje encontrado de películas caseras de 8 y 16 mm con texto y audio para moldear historias sobre personas atrapadas, a menudo de manera traumática, en grandes catástrofes políticas y sociales. Aunque se sitúan en un tiempo y espacio concreto, su forma es emblemática y trata cuestiones que van más allá de sus orígenes históricos particulares: colonialismo, apartheid, locura y modernidad, migraciones, globalización y cambio climático.
Last update 22nd October 2020
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STEVENSON
- Address
- Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road, 7925, Cape Town | Amsterdam, South Africa | Netherlands
- Phone
- +27214621500
- joost@stevenson.info
- Website
- www.stevenson.info
STEVENSON has an international exhibition programme with a particular focus on the region. Founded in 2003, the gallery has spaces in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam. It is jointly owned by its eleven directors. The gallery has expanded prevailing definitions of the region, bringing the work of practitioners such as Rineke Dijkstra, Shine Shivan, Sosa Joseph, Paulo Nazareth, Ruth Ige, Aziz Hazara and Frida Orupabo—who hail from different geographies and diasporas—to local audiences for the first time.