Page 84 - Art Review

Dineo Seshee Bopape

So complex are the fragile constellations of Dineo Seshee Bopape’s South Africa, they appear to speak of a specific use of language and
practice that her sculptures evade the easy didacticism of a casual poetics both rooted in personal meaning.
description. But here goes: an egg-shaped form rests alongside a strip The violent objects of collective memory, taken up in the Rhodes
of compressed soil decorated with womb-healing herbs and minerals, Must Fall protest movement’s call to ‘decolonise’ education across
casts of a uterus and curved lumps of clay rendered by a clenched fist. South Africa, resonates with Bopape’s ongoing interest in the recon-
I first encountered her work in 2015 while we were both on resi- figuration of a history shorn of its ideological limitations. The trace of
dency at Hospitalfield in Arbroath, Scotland. In conversation, she Afro-diasporic traditions can be seen in +/-1791 (monument to the haitian
spoke about sonically mapping the continental rivers of Africa, revolution 1791), presented at the Sharjah Biennial in 2017, a homage
before shifting focus to talk of “cosmological beliefs” and “voodoo to Haiti’s revolution against French colonial rule. This work seems
priestesses”. The substance of Bopape’s practice is as various as to lay the ground for her contribution to the fourth edition of the
her intellectual interests, and becomes even more magical as she Future Generation Art Prize, recently presented in Venice: slabs of
begins to elaborate. Through her use or misuse of the language of soil are covered with feathers, wax, crystals, gold leaf (a reference to
Postconceptualism, Bopape’s work reveals something of the sculp- the gold rush that led to the founding of Johannesburg), shells and,
ture’s inherent porosity. Forms might feel random, but rarely acci- again, the same fist-indented lumps of clay. Its spiritual aesthetics
dental. For the past year or so, her work has grappled with questions suggests a kind of ideological inversion of Land art, speaking to the
of individual, collective and planetary sovereignty through a broader landlessness of Africa’s indigenous majority as an ongoing sociopo-
meditation on the Anthropocene. The outcome is a chorus of code- litical trauma, and to the dispossession of land under colonial orders
pendent forms bound by a sense of containment, displacement and that led to precarious conditions of soil. Like the palm-clenched clay,
the sociohistorical politics of land and landlessness. While they may her work mediates between the self and the object; it can be formed
not ‘represent’ the artist’s experience of growing up in Polokwane, into something or simply disintegrate back to dust.

sa___ke lerole, (sa lerole ke___), 2016 (installation view, Art in General, New York, 2016)

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