Background
Mary Sibande was born in 1982, in Barberton, South Africa. Her mother is as a domestic worker and her father is a military in the South African Army. Mary was raised by her grandmother.
University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
In 2007, Mary received a Bachelor of Technology degree from the University of Johannesburg.
From right to left: Mary Sibande and Anelisa Matanzima.
Mary Sibande was born in 1982, in Barberton, South Africa. Her mother is as a domestic worker and her father is a military in the South African Army. Mary was raised by her grandmother.
In 2004, Mary got a diploma in Fine Arts from the Technikon Witwatersrand. Later, she continued her education at the University of Johannesburg, graduating with a Bachelor of Technology degree in 2007.
In 2006, Mary was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In 2008, she held the same position at Prohelvetia-IAAB in Basel, Switzerland. In 2010, Sibande was an artist-in-residence at Kunstraum Sylt Quelle in Sylt, Germany.
Sibande’s career as an artist came under the spotlight with the opening of the exhibition "Long Live the Dead Queen" at the Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2009, where she introduced the main feature of her work — Sophie — a life-size sculpture, modeled in the artist’s own image. In 2010, Mary's work was shown in the South African Pavilion during the 2010 Venice Biennale. The same year, her work "Long Live the Dead Queen" was found in murals all over the city of Johannesburg during the FIFA World Cup.
In 2013, Sibande had an artistic residency at the MAC/VAL Museum of Modern Art in France, where she created a groundbreaking installation, entitled "A reversed retrogress, scene 2". At that time, her work "The Purple Shall Govern" toured South Africa from Grahamstown, through Port Elizabeth to Bloemfontein, Kimberley and Potchefstroom, ending in Johannesburg in early 2014.
During her artistic career, Sibande exhibited around the world in internationally leading museums. In 2010, she took part in the L’Exposition du Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar and her work was featured in the review "From Pierneef to Gugulective: 1910-2010". Other galleries and events, where her work was shown, include: the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2011), the Museum Beelden aan Zee in Hague, Netherlands (2012), the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Paris, France (2013), Lyon Biennale 2013 in Lyon, France, the Musée Léon Driex in Saint Denis, La Réunion Island (2014), the British Museum in London, United Kingdom (2016), Kalmar Konstmuseum in Sweden (2017), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (2018) and many others.
Since 2018, Mary has been acting as a Virginia C. Gildersleeve Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.
The main element in Mary's work is the sculpture, named Sophie, which is also considered by the artist to be her alter-ego. The sculpture, Sophie, attempts to critique the long history of oppression in South Africa.
For Sibande, the body, particularly the skin and clothing, is the site, where history is contested and where fantasies play out. Centrally, she looks at the generational disempowerment of black women and in this sense, her work is informed by postcolonial theory. Also, in her work, the domestic setting acts as a stage, where historical psychodramas play out.
Moreover, Mary's work highlights, how privileged ideals of beauty and femininity, aspired to by black women, discipline their body through rituals of imitation and reproduction.
Sibande inverts the social power, indexed by pseudo-Victorian costumes, by reconfiguring it as a domestic worker’s "uniform", problematizing the colonial relationship between "a slave" and "a master" in a post-apartheid context. The textile, used to produce uniforms for domestic workers, is strongly associated with domestic spaces in South Africa, and by applying it to Victorian dress, she attempts to make a comment about the history of servitude as it relates to the present in terms of domestic relationships.