Mary Sibande’s new series titled “A View Through the Peephole” marks a shift toward a new softness: an imagined space of leisure articulated through painterly marks and gestures created through the monotype process. The series consists of eight watercolour monotypes and their ghosts, continuing Sibande’s iconic use of blue.
“As the maker, I position the viewer to observe Sophie engaged in leisurely activities, but that gaze is mediated and restricted through a peephole. The peephole becomes a device of control and distance; it limits what can be seen while heightening a sense of curiosity and intrusion. It suggests secrecy, surveillance, and a quiet violation of privacy, placing the viewer in an uneasy position between passive observer and active voyeur.”
David Krut Projects proudly presented leading South African artist, Mary Sibande at the inaugural Conductor Fair, at Powerhouse Arts, New York in May 2026 and the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York alongside other accomplished South African artists.
Produced in collaboration with printer Roxy Kaczmarek the David Krut Workshop in Johannesburg. The artist situates her alter ego – Sophie – within an intimate register: dreaming, idling, and inhabiting moments of everyday joy long denied to Black women under apartheid. The works propose rest and imagination not as indulgences, but as radical assertions of the right to simply exist.
“These are prints, works on paper, and I placed Sophie’s leisurely activities on paper intentionally. There is something about paper that feels intimate, almost like a postcard that says, “wish you were here,” a snapshot of a place, a mood, an experience. A piece of paper you can take home that will later become a memory.
In these works, I show Sophie doing things she was once denied as a Black woman during apartheid, resting, dreaming, finding joy in the everyday. She refuses the boundaries that institutions once used to restrict Black people’s access to freedom and leisure. Here, she claims space for joy, for rest, for imagination.
And that, in itself, is a radical act, to simply be.”
