Penny Siopis (Veryburg, South Africa, 1953) lives and works in South Africa, where her family, of Greek origin, settled after World War II. Her artistic practice explores the intersection between personal and collective memory, and deals with issues such as the struggle against apartheid or the settlers' repressive policies on the indigenous population.

His work, polyphonic and interdisciplinary, moves between painting, drawing and cinematographic fact combining the intimate with the historical and the symbolic with the political. Among his most significant projects stands out Shame (Shame), an extensive corpus of works in which shrunken or diluted bodies shape a universe where shame is a narrative and emotional axis. Siopis traces a history of humanity marked by humiliation and violence, but also by the possibility of recognition and catharsis.

In Siopis's work, shame unfolds as a territory of shared pain and collective catharsis that, from a Lacanian perspective, alludes to the loss of the symbolic place of love and bond. At the same time, this space opens up to a dimension of enjoyment: the body, in its fragility, seeks in the impulse of death a possible space of redemption and sublimation. Shame questions the limits of the body and of history and reveals how the wound, personal or collective, can become poetic and political matter, a form of resistance to oblivion.

The show will also include Charmed Lives _ (_Lucky Lives, 1998-1999), a large canvas of found objects that acts as a collective memory woven from individual experiences. On the other hand, the archive occupies a central place in the work of this artist: cabinets with sealed drawers evoke a hidden memory, invisible by hegemonic discourses. This exhibition, which presents Siopis's work in Barcelona for the first time, intertwines the relationships between the memories of the north and the south.

**Curated by: ** Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum.