Pinky Pinky is a name that is whispered in Johannesburg classrooms. Living between the girls and boys toilets at school, Pinky Pinky is half man, half woman, half animal: a mythical hybrid who nonetheless acts like a man by attacking and even raping the girls who come to the toilet, especially if they are wearing pink panties. Unlike the girls, the boys can’t see him, but if he catches them he will slap or scratch them on the cheek.
Pinky Pinky is an urban legend who seems to live mainly in the imagination of prepubescent children and adolescents. Once talked about mainly in black schools, with classroom integration of schools after the first democratic elections of 1994, white children started hearing about Pinky Pinky, too.
In 2000 artist Penny Siopis started making a series of paintings based on young peoples’ descriptions of Pinky Pinky. Says Siopis, “Pinky Pinky allegorizes a post-apartheid moment of radical social transition and all the fears associated with change since 1994. He embodies different guises according to different fears.” In each painting the trickster assumes a new appearance, given eerie form by Siopis’s impasto application of paint or the addition of objects like a rubber mask or glass eyes.
Then one day in 2006, attracted by a red beaded lion’s head offered for sale by a roadside vendor, Siopis commissioned the seller to make a beaded Pinky Pinky figure from a photocopy of one of her paintings. The three-dimensional sculpture so pleased Siopis that two further commissions followed. One Pinky Pinky figure had red lesions and scars all over his body; another was covered in long brown hairs.
Powerful as Siopis’ Pinky Pinky paintings are, the removal of the artist’s hand from the three beaded Pinky Pinky figures locates them in a new space. Clearly linked in form to the beaded objects sold by black vendors and dangled in front of car windows at urban street corners, the figures have an anonymous fetishlike quality, adding to their ambiguous nature.
For the citywide exhibition CAPE ’07, Siopis set up an installation of a child’s toilet, classroom chairs, a blackboard with text, and an exercise book where visitors were invited to record their own Pinky Pinky stories. Called Pinky Pinky Comes to Cape Town, Siopis’s installation inhabited adjoining rooms in the Cape Town Castle, a historic building that once housed slaves.
“For me,” says Siopis, “Pinky Pinky is as much a victim of violent acts as a perpetrator of violence, a constructed ‘somebody’—a scapegoat—to blame for all our current social ills, whether these be associated with violent crime, AIDS, xenophobia, poverty, child abuse, or residual white power. But as a creature of the imagination, Pinky Pinky can also offer us a form to find new ways of relating to each other.”
Pinky Pinky 2003–04
Oil and found objects on canvas
380 x 122 cm
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Penny Siopis
Pinky Pinky Comes to Cape Town (detail) 2007
Wire and bead sculptures and found objects
Installation in the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Penny Siopis
Pinky Pinky Comes to Cape Town (detail) 2007
Wire and bead sculptures and found objects
Installation in the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Michael Hall
© Penny Siopis