Walking the path as we make it: navigating “sticky” situations with Mary Sibande’s “Sophie”

Abstract

abstractArt works are made to be seen, we come to galleries to look – and we are comforted by this agentic positionality. However, in Mary Sibande’s sculptures and photographic performances of a larger than life representation of a domestic worker named “Sophie”, this kind of looking is complicated. Inspired by the intimate reality of her mother’s experience as a domestic worker, Sibande probes the lingering legacy of apartheid in the white South African home through the fictional figure of Sophie. The imaginary life of Sophie is collated through a series of human scale sculptures and photographic prints. The story of Sophie has typically been one of a domestic worker who finds sanctuary from her oppressive reality through dreams and imagination. When read in conversation with Black feminist scholars Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde and Gabeba Baderoon the supposed fixities of the “domestic worker figure” begin to unravel. In this article, I am less concerned with the conventional narrative of Sophie as simply escaping her reality; but rather as occupying her reality. Here the subversion of domesticity is directed to the “white home” in which I, a white woman, am implicated in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. Sophie seems to absorb my gaze in such a way so as to create the “me” that is looking. The depiction of Sophie as a kind of interruption points to Sibande’s power to inform the public imaginary and transform it through demanding resistant audiences engage with the possibility of “reimagined gendered freedoms” that throw off the “sticky” meanings associated with domestic servitude and alert us to the contradictions of the postcolonial present.