Mary Sibande’s photography and sculpture interrogates South Africa’s complex past and uncertain future. The leading artist’s life-sized, richly hued works form a narrative that dissects race, gender and politics to reflect upon how her country is shaping its post Apartheid identity. Sibande’s accolades are boundless. She has exhibited around the world, from L’Exposition du Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar to the Curitiba Biennale in Paraná, Brazil. She represented South Africa at the 2011 Venice Biennale, won the 2017 Smithsonian National Museum of African Arts Award and is the 2018-2019 Virginia C. Gildersleeve Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Now she is enjoying her first London solo show at Somerset House, entitled I Came Apart at the Seams, which just opened to coincide with the 1-54 contemporary African art fair (for which Nataal is a media partner). The exhibition traverses 10 years of works that follow Sibande’s alter ego Sophie as her story – and that of South Africa’s journey through and past colonialism - vividly evolves.

As a young girl from Barberton in eastern South Africa, Sibande wasn’t exposed to art. She watched TV, read magazines and immersed herself in the world of media. “I was actually more into fashion, it was the one thing that belonged to black people and couldn’t be taken away by the Apartheid regime,” Sibande says. Nevertheless she discovered her talent for fine art at university, first at Witwatersrand Technikon and then the University of Johannesburg. During her final year, while researching her personal history, she developed the 2008 series They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To, which introduced the world to Sophie.

Her sculptural form is modelled on the artist and first appeared dressed as a domestic maid – a role female members of Sibande’s family were forced to hold in generations before her. Sophie both bares the weight of subjugation and marginalisation and defies it with her strength, femininity and blackness. Progressing through subsequent series, Long Live the Dead Queen (2009-13), The Purple Shall Govern (2013-17) and now I Came Apart at the Seams (2019-), Sophie’s body and dress becomes a site for writing a counter history.

She appears as a solder, a priest, a queen, a high priestess - each step more defiant and fantastical than the last as she moves toward empowerment. The dominant colour palette also progresses – the blue associated with domestic staff, the purple representing resistance during Apartheid (specifically Cape Town’s 1989 Purple Rain Protest) and the red of unabashed anger and revenge. Sophie inhabits historical, biblical and spiritual realms yet today’s South Africa is never far away.

The Somerset House exhibition brings together works from each of these series, culminating in the newest series from which the show takes its name. “I started this work way before what has been happening in South Africa between Africans now. I was looking at anger as a subject and why this anger existed,” she explains of I Come Apart at the Seams. Its sees Sophie joined by red dogs with glaring, ferocious teeth and eyes set on their prey, ready to devour whatever is in their way.

“I needed to find a visual language and I started with the red dogs. In isiZulu language, it says when someone is angry they become a red dog and anger is said to be animalistic. It also says when someone is angry they don’t see straight, they see red. There’s a similar reference in the English language. So it was a visual metaphor that I wanted to use to speak of anger,” the artist says.

Sibande see’s the anger as the aftermath of broken promises of the post Apartheid era, which today affect the poorest section of society, away from the middle class suburbs around the country. She speaks of Umkhonto we Sizwe, meaning ‘Spear of the Nation’ and the student protests of 1996 that saw many young people either flee the country to train for combat in Zimbabwe and Zambia or suffer the unimaginable at the hands of the Apartheid regime. This unresolved and unreleased anger fuels Sibande’s newest work.

It’s no denying that gender politics is also at the heart of her practice. Sophie is the vessel through which she embodies her grandmother, aunt and great grandmother and this shared history is a way of understanding herself and her position as a South African woman. This self-evaluation can be seen in works where two Sophies face off in similar stances, different yet the same. “They are doing different things with their bodies but the actions are actually the same when you look at it. You don’t know whether they are dancing, fighting or embracing. And this is South Africa to me.”

Mary Sibande’s approach brings to mind the work of other contemporary South African artists such as Athi-Patra Ruga and Zanele Muholi who also powerfully preoccupied with examining the state of affairs in South Africa through various characters, albeit in vastly different ways. “I’ve always said that writers will write, creators will create and politicians will politicise. I can’t speak on behalf of those artists but I think it’s a way of understanding South Africa. And the further you go, you find it’s not a beautiful history, even though there is beauty in my work,” Sibande reflects.

What is evident is the need to interrogate South Africa’s past and bring buried emotions to the surface as they come apart at the seams. “I feel like I’m in dark room where I’m trying to find things out, feel things, and at the same time create these images of my thoughts and feelings.”

Mary Sibande: I Came Apart at the Seams is on view at Somerset House until 5 January 2020 - part of The Charles Russell Speechlys Terrace Room Series