Mary Sibande's Long Live the Dead Queen series is an on-going installation in the Johannesburg art gallery, MOMO. The subject of this series, Sophie, is a life-sized corporeal presence; she is Sibande's alter-ego cast from Sibande's own body. A central formal element of Sophie is her costume: a voluminous dress that hybridizes the South African domestic servant's uniform and a Victorian madam's dress. A dress denoting both servitude and dominance, it immediately recalls the colonizer/colonized dialectic between the early British Victorian colonizer and many Black African peoples whom the Victorians consigned to subordination, particularly in South Africa. Sophie is seemingly fixed within this binary power system: her visible identity oscillates between maid and Victorian. Furthermore, her eyes are always downcast so that she initially appears to embrace her subservience. However, I argue that her refusal, or even inability, to acknowledge her surroundings might alternatively demarcate her into a subjective, fantasy space, and one that she necessarily controls. She conflates historical identities that persist in present South African circumstances, so she also denies our ability to locate her within logical time or space, underscoring the notion of fantasy. Within this, Sophie can reclaim agency despite her servitude, performing in various positions of power to resituate dialectical power relationships between dominant/subordinate, master/slave. In other words, the postmodern play of Sophie becomes a postcolonial opposition to subjugation. Throughout each chapter I will apply the psychoanalytic treatment of sublimation in which a socially unacceptable desire, that of a collective or individual, is displaced onto something socially appropriate within the context of that society. I can thus look more closely at the methods by which Sophie draws attention to surreptitious and manipulated power relationships, and the ways she then dislodges these relationships from the power dialectic. / text

The purpose of this study is twofold: firstly, to analyse the manner in which surrealist art may correlate with a hysterical mode of representation; and secondly, to develop this understanding of the relation between hysterical representation and surrealism into an interpretative framework for the analysis of the contemporary artworks of the South African artist, Mary Sibande. I characterise hysteria as a mode of representation where repressed traumatic knowledge and repressed desire is articulated in an indirect and cryptic manner, by means of fantasy and through the register of the body. By undertaking a comparative analysis of hysteria and surrealism, I determine the various ways in which surrealism may coincide with and comprise a form of hysterical representation. I aim to demonstrate that surrealist artists do not only borrow from the iconography of hysteria, but that their artworks frequently emulate the structure of the hysterical symptom and that their portraits often reflect a hysterical form of subjectivity. In this study I therefore demonstrate, firstly, that hysterical representation may underlie the surrealist artwork inasmuch as such an artwork comprises an enigmatic and indirect representation of repressed traumatic impressions and desire, where repressed psychical content is articulated predominantly by means of fantasy and through the body; and, secondly, that this structure also underlies the artworks of Mary Sibande. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Visual Arts / DPhil / Unrestricted