Dineo Seshee Bopape
This artwork was loaned to the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance curated by Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk, Iziko South Africa National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. It is indexed here as part of Smith and Van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.
b.1981, Polokwane
Dineo Seshee Bopape assembles the personal out of the public, inscribing individual intimacies in commonplace materials, from found objects, sounds and images to more elemental matter: clay, soil, ash, wood. Land is central to her practice, in works which hold both the histories of contested spaces – those of colonial conquest and capitalist extraction – and earth’s transcendental significance in productive tension. These considerations of memory as both metaphysical and material impression more often pair the organic and fabricated, analogue and digital, in installations of poetic discord that are multilingual, transcending singularity. Speaking of her “hunger for elsewhere,” the artist addresses the globalisation of the art market, the statelessness of artists, embracing “hyperbole,” where a shifting self-image offers a means with which to enter alternative worlds.