Dineo Seshee Bopape

Dineo Seshee Bopape’s haunting installations and videos evoke reflections on memory and hegemony over land and bodies in relation to the lived experiences of the South African people. Her work is informed by the quest for a visual, acoustic and material language that creates an autochthonous aesthetic. It articulates the resilience and healing of the Afro-diasporic people, as well as their sustained energies of resistance to and emancipation from the violence of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

In Lerato le le golo (…la go hloka bo kantle), her 2022 exhibition at secession in Vienna, Bopape employed carefully selected everyday materials such as soil, clay, fabric, plastic, containers, paint and digital media. Their properties aligned to prompt ideas about politics, aesthetics, the metaphysics of self/spirit, sovereignty, presence, home, land and waters, language, song and memory.

Dineo Seshee Bopape (b. 1981, Polokwane, South Africa) is a South African multimedia artist. Using experimental video montages, sound, found objects, photographs and dense sculptural installations, her artwork engages with powerful socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation.