A Disquieting Strangeness: Evocations of the Uncanny in Penelope Siopis’s Who is Pinky Pinky? Series

I examine selected examples of the Who is Pinky Pinky? series of paintings (2002-2004) by the artist Penelope Siopis. The series depicts a hybrid, formless, grotesque creature, which Siopis describes as ‘a white tokololoshe, albino, bogeyman, stranger … an imagined character that finds shape in the … tellings of the myths [with whom s/he is associated].’1 The myths mirror unspeakable psychic states of fear and moral panic. Pinky Pinky is the indefinable personification of alienness, foreignness, strangeness, reflective of the repressed or sublimated fear and loathing often associated with the other. S/he is the balaclava-clad head of the criminal (a resonant image in South Africa where violent crime statistics are amongst the highest in the world); the recovering burn victim (another pertinent image given the burning of a Mozambican immigrant, victim of xenophobic violence in South Africa in 2008), or ‘… the fear of residual white power or the nameless dread associated with failing confidence in continuity, stability and tradition.’2 Despite this register of sublimated fear, these paintings also evoke a sense of fascination and familiarity. Reconciliation between fear and familiarity is discussed with reference to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich.3 Symbolically, an encounter with the uncanny enables an encounter with a part of the self which has been repressed; it marks a return of that which has become disturbingly foreign or strange in the psychic economy because it is no longer familiar to the subject. Julia Kristeva’s4 re-reading of Freud’s Unheimlich as the other-as-stranger within, and Eric Santner’s openess to the uncanny strangeness of the other who is ‘the bearer of an internal alterity’ are considered as lenses through which these paintings may be read in an attempt to engage with, and possibly embrace, ‘the other within’ or a form of an estranged self located in the unconscious.