Artist, Marlene Dumas: This painting started with myself, or me looking at myself, in this sort of awkward position of being, you know, the blonde, friendly, spontaneous woman—which is an old problem of who you think you are, and how other people see you.
The title Evil is Banal does actually come from the Hannah Arendt text about the fact that in something like Nazi bureaucracy how banal everything is.
When you listen to the stories of the Truth and Reconciliation trials in South Africa, where people were tortured, you know, when they walk into this room, it's an ordinary room, and there's an ordinary man sitting there. I mean this mixture of sometimes the ordinary aspect of things, and then the terrible things that people can do to one another.
So I use myself in that sense also as an example as a white girl who grew up in South Africa, but in the broadest sense also the notions of what white was supposed to stand for, and what black was supposed to stand for.
No work has only got one reason to be, so some of the other thoughts that went through my mind while busy painting this painting was in certain fairy tales, in the Walt Disney fairy tale, the blonde girl is the good girl and the darker one is the witch.
So hopefully my works also help to broaden one's ways of looking at all the easy type of things that a certain culture has taught you—one realizes that the world does not quite work like that.