"Penny Siopis. Ink, Blood and History" Exhibition
22 October 2026 – 14 March 2027 · 10:00
Museu Tàpies, la Dreta de l'Eixample, Eixample
Penny Siopis (Veryburg, South Africa, 1953) lives and works in South Africa, where her Greek family settled after the Second World War. Her artistic practice explores the intersection between personal and collective memory and addresses themes such as the struggle against apartheid and the repressive policies imposed by colonists on the indigenous population. Her polyphonic and interdisciplinary work moves between painting, drawing and film, combining the intimate with the historical and the symbolic with the political. Among her most significant projects is Shame, an extensive body of work in which contracted or dissolved bodies form a universe where shame becomes the narrative and emotional axis. Siopis traces a history of humanity marked by humiliation and violence, but also by the possibility of recognition and catharsis. In Siopis's work, shame unfolds as a territory of shared pain and collective catharsis which, from a Lacanian perspective, alludes to the loss of the symbolic place of love and connection. At the same time, this space opens onto a dimension of jouissance: the body, in its fragility, seeks in the death drive a possible space of redemption and sublimation.…
Source: Ajuntament de Barcelona · checked on 8 September 2026