Mary Sibande: I Came Apart at the Seams

Sibande’s fictional alter-ego, Sophie, wears a maid’s uniform, complete with a crisp white apron and bonnet, the clothing which Sibande’s own mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all would have worn, and been defined by, in their roles as domestic workers.

With each series, Long Live the Dead Queen (2009-13), The Purple Shall Govern (2013-17) and I Came Apart at the Seams (2019-), Sibande captures three stages of Sophie’s transformation from her beginnings as a domestic housemaid into a myriad of empowered characters, transcending histories of oppression, racial bias, and marginalisation to rewrite her position in both historical and contemporary narratives. Through Sophie, Sibande pays homage to the generations of women in her family’s past who worked as domestic labourers, critiquing stereotypical depictions of the female body in South Africa. Sophie’s clothing transitions through three colour stages; blue, purple and red. With each colour, Sibande draws from three defining periods of South African history in which she seeks redress: the rise and rule of the Apartheid system, its subsequent fall, and the legacy of apartheid. In sharing their previously untold stories, Sibande challenges stereotypical depictions of Black women in post-apartheid South Africa throughout history and today.

In the present lot, with her eyes shut and her white apron and bonnet being cast aside, Sophie’s imagination allows her to break free of the constraints of her domestic uniform. In Sibande’s second series of works, The Purple Shall Govern (2013-17), the artist captures the next phase of Sophie’s transformation in full effect, as she meets and confronts her future self, taking the lead role in narratives which would have been denied to Sibande’s ancestors. Drawing inspiration from Cape Town’s 1989 Purple Rain Protest, which saw thousands of anti-apartheid protestors arrested after they were marked by police with purple dye, Sibande explores the important, and often painful process, of looking back at one’s past in order to move forward and make way for new ideas and identities.