A Rising Star of South Africa's Art Scene The work of Mary Sibande (b. 1982 in Baberton, South Africa; lives and works in Johannesburg) uses personal histories to interrogate the current intersections of race, gender, and labor in South Africa. Sibande continues to actively rewrite her own family's legacy of forced domestic work imposed by the then Apartheid State. She employs the human form as a vehicle through photography and sculpture for a focused critique of the stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women. For the artist, the body, and especially how we clothe it, is the site where this history is contested and where her own fantasies can play out. The book unfolds this counter-history through an alter ego formed in Sibande's early work, a persona by the name of Sophie. Sophie is adorned in outfits that reimagine the domestic worker's uniform. Altering these dress styles into Victorian motifs, the artist completely rethinks the way Sophie occupies the historic narratives that were stolen and denied to her. This is the first survey monograph on Mary Sibande with essays by Deborah Willis, Zoé Whitley a. o.