:

The New Parthenon, 2016 followed by the projection Obscure White Messenger, 2010

Thursday 16:00
Obscure White Messenger, 2010
digital video, sound, color, in English
with subtitles in Mandarin
15 min 04 sec

The New Parthenon, 2016
digital video, sound, color, in English
with subtitles in Mandarin
15 min 26 sec

Penny Siopis works in film, painting, and installation. In her films she combines random found 8 mm and 16 mm home movie footage with text and sound, to shape stories about people caught up, often traumatically, in larger political and social upheavals. While the stories are of a very particular time and place, their allegorical form speaks to questions far beyond their specific historical origins. The footage relies on the text to hook contingency to story and translate into “the voice in the head” of the reader/viewer. Translation as an idea is signaled by the way the text follows the form, but not the function, of subtitles conventionally used to translate “foreign” language films. This device compounds the double register of her films more generally, where inner and outer narratives are deliberately confused, feeling both true and false, real and imagined, at the same time. Accompanied by music, the effect is affective and dreamlike.

Obscure White Messenger tells the story of Dimitrios Tsafendas who assassinated the South African prime minister and “architect of apartheid,” HF Verwoerd, in 1966. What drove Tsafendas, a man of mixed race, a migrant working as a parliamentary messenger at the time, to commit this act? Siopis explores the intermingling of madness and political motive evident in archives on Tsafendas. Throughout the film there is the question of who the “illegitimate” Tsafendas is, and where he belongs; of what it means to be stateless in a world in which citizenship all too often establishes and legitimates what it means to be fully human.

The New Parthenon weaves a story of an ordinary man who meditates on his modern Greek history of war, globalization, migration, and tension with “the West.” The man resembles the figure of the artist’s father.