Etre Femme: Cinthia Sifa Binene

Cinthia Sifa Binene 
Être Femme (To be a Woman)
Mixed Media
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)


Overview: A lighter skinned young woman in an elaborate fin de siecle dress gazes into a dresser mirror, almost embracing her reflected visage; a young, darker-skinned woman seated at the base of a closet filled with clothes gazes into a hand mirror. She is composed of collage that reads in part "Take it Off," and  her midriff is composed of the image of a beast, perhaps a bovine.   A girl or boy in shorts, more monochromatic than the females, stands off to the right side.




Artist's Statement:   The lockdown reminds me of the year 2007. I was 8 Years old and my family had just moved to South Africa. My siblings and I stayed at home that year while my mom

looked for work and a school for us. We learnt almost everything from our neighbours, watched shows and cartoons on TV. This time has highlighted what we truly have and what is most important - a roof over one’s head, support, structure, love and care. It has made me both grateful and deeply concerned for the health and safety of  others.

Pamela Allara   Biene’s mixed media collage “Etre Femme” poses a conundrum rather than providing a clear example. At the right is the familiar example from western art history of a young woman admiring her face in the mirror, the exemplar of female vanity. Her reflection shows a much plainer face, hardly the beauty she imagines herself to be. On the floor at her feet is the Venus of Willendorf, the historical origin of the cult of female beauty and fecundity. To her right is a bust of a male patriarch, the assurance of her proper role in society. She is surrounded by vases of white flowers, signaling that beauty is primarily attributed to women who are white. At the center of the collage is a black woman in a bathing suit, who also admires herself in the mirror. The pose is passive, in comparison to the white woman’s active pose, but this visual subordination is counteracted by the surprising tattoo on her stomach of the head of a horned animal, perhaps a cow. Is she being portrayed as an animal? And finally, standing on the far right is a pre-pubescent figure who could be either male or female---gender yet to be determined. S/he holds a heart to the chest, and wears an odd headdress. On the shoulder are two animals, one a bird, the other a rodent. Only the white woman avoids the connection of womanhood with animal. Biene seems to be suggesting that womanhood is defined quite differently depending on one’s race—or rather she is commenting on that idea with ironic humor.

Mark Auslander;  As Pam notes, in classical European art, gazing into a mirror is often depicted as a sign of Vanitas, of excessive fixation on earthly things that will ultimately pass away. Yet, here, I suggest, the mirrors may evoke a positive process of self-exploration and remembrance, occasioned by the Lockdown. The title, Être Femme ("To be a Woman)" implies a process of emerging femininity, taking place within the confines of the domestic realm. As for Alice in  Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, passage through a household mirror is figured as a journey of feminine self-discovery and unbridled imagination.  As in Usha Seejarim's Broom Closet, one of the initial works of the TLC project,  the female closet is here envisioned as an interior space of mystery and magical transformation.  The artist may be drawing as well on a longer artistic history of women privately pondering their own beauty through mirrored surfaces, as in impressionist Berthe Morrisot's Woman at her Toilette and The Psyche Mirror.  There may also be echoes of John Singer Sargent's masterpiece, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, a complex exploration of girls' psychological development over time, which in a sense culminates in a mysterious shadowy mirror.

I am unsure how to read the use of racial imagery in the work. The face of the woman wearing the late 19th century bustle dress on the left might be read as white or fair skinned, but her reflected visage in the mirror seems to be that of a woman of a color. Perhaps the artist alludes to the process of interpolated reading of images glimpsed on television screens during her childhood, in which glamorous white or light skinned stars and celebrities were re-imagined in terms that were less racially restricted. Hence, the middle female figure, seated on the floor, might be read as more comfortable in her beautiful blackness, gazed upon within a smaller hand mirror that she herself controls.  Having said that, if the image over her midsection is that of cow, as Pam suggests, the inference might be that African women remain defined in terms of livestock payments of lobola bridewealth, which legitimate her transfer from one male dominated lineage to another.  If so, is the collage written injunction to "take it off" a command to define oneself in different terms than that laid down by the patriarchy?

Mirror, Mirror

Gazing at the mirrors in Sifa Binene's enigmatic image, I find myself recalling Jean and John Comaroff's 1991 analysis of the hand mirrors distributed by British non conformist Protestant missionaries on the southern African frontier in the mid 19th century.  The evangelists celebrated the hand mirror as an exemplar of privatized individual experience, held to be foundational for transformative encounters with scripture, which offered the radical possibility of unmediated individual encounters with the Divine.  Tswana political and spiritual leaders initially resisted the hand mirror as excessively individuating, cutting off the person from the full continuum of social and spiritual inter-connectedness.

In Sifa Binese's chamber, however, the evoked journey towards self-realization does not seem to be geared towards excessive individualism; the artist emphasizes in her statement that the time of enforced confinement reminds us of our responsibilities towards others. This theme seems to made manifest in the shadowy figure of the child (perhaps the artist's siblings) in shorts on the right, who is one senses is protected by her or his older sisters, even as they launch themselves on their own interior journeys of self discovery. (This younger figure seems to have an African sculptural figure perched on his or her shoulder; perhaps we see an nkisi nkonde power figure, evocative of the artist's own Congolese heritage.)

I am reminded, as well of Jane Taylor's 2009 Lacanian reading of the mirror scene in Handspring Puppet's realization of Büchner’s play Woyzeck (directed William Kentridge, 1992 and 2008). As the adult woman puppet Maria ponders herself in her small hand mirror, she tells her infant son that she is just as beautiful as elite women who gaze at their own images in floor to ceiling full body mirrors. The scene, Taylor argues, is a complex reworking of what Lacan terms the mirror stage, in which the developing child comes to develop his or her initial experiences of selfhood (as opposed to earlier experiences of primal oneness, of unconstrained continuity between the self, the primary caregiver and the wider universe) through mimetic encounters with the face of the mother.  The skillful use of puppets by Handspring Puppets, which performatively posits an 'as if' reality to the puppet that seems to bring it to life, is equivalent to the magic of the mirror stage, through which consciousness is gradually nurtured across early childhood: by playing with and speaking to the newborn, 'as if' it were a conscious being, that developing infant increasingly gains self-awareness. Thus, through the play of fantasy, sentience is miraculously catalyzed in the real world.

I do not know if Sifa Binene is familiar with the Kentridge/Handspring Puppets production of Woyzeck, but her work can be read in comparable light: the central seated figure's self-exploration through the hand mirror links her both to the standing elite woman of lost time to the left, and to the developing boy on the right, calling into being, within her own mind and within this beautiful room, the complex glittering constellation of family development and attachment, which will sustain her, and all of us, across the life course.

References.

Comaroff, Jean and John. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Jane, 2009.  Editor's Introduction. Handspring Puppet Company. Edited by Jane Taylor.

Parkwood, South Africa, David Krut.