Penny Siopis is one of the most significant artists working in South Africa today. Spanning more than 30 years and shifting across media, her work explores what she calls the “poetics of vulnerability,” challenging memory and creating counternarratives to the history propagated by the apartheid regime. In her films, human vulnerability is given form in fragile images and materials that tell stories about anonymous, everyday people, their lives shaped by political violence and domination. These stories speak also to larger political concerns: to histories of migration, exile, colonialism, and apartheid. Obscure White Messenger and The Master Is Drowning, both included in this program, are idiosyncratic explorations of 1960s South Africa and apartheid in the era of notorious South African prime minister H. F. Verwoerd (known as the “architect of apartheid”). Presented in conjunction with South Africa in Apartheid and After.