Jump to content

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Add links
From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium
This person article needs cleanup. Please review Wikiquote:Templates, especially the standard format of people articles, to determine how to edit this article to conform to a higher standard of article quality.

Dineo Seshee Bopape (born 1981)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.

Quotes

[edit]
  • I think everybody is a post-colonial artist; we’re all living in post-colonial societies.
  • My focus is to separate what has created the self [and] what is the representation of personality and group identity.
  • Life itself is quite ‘kaleidoscopic’ and surreal. Perhaps as an artist or a ‘self,’ it is an assemblage of possibilities, probabilities and the real as more strange than the fiction. The fictions also are too heavy.
  • Real life requires one to perform many adjectives (for example being woman/happy/doctor/young/in love/friend/older sister....there are varying conventions that dictate how certain adjectives are activated), and for people or objects to participate in the world, i guess they have to perform--well, i guess we make objects perform--through their use, their place in language. i am interested in objects performing passively...alluding in a very scattered way to disparate things, somehow dancing their colours, textures, thingness with other things...and their thingnesses too.
  • It’s a continuation of all the work I do, I guess. I’m thinking about holes. About holes in memory. About how mirrors can provide holes, how they can perforate the illusion, break the linearity. A mirror can offer something different, a different perspective. An opportunity to go to the other side.
  • I’ll be working with soil and clay, and hopefully feathers.
  • I’m interested in that moment of passion that sets everything around it alight. That saturation of pain, of no longer being willing to endure it. That is rebellion. I think of Khwezi, Fezeka. Of that rebellion spirit of standing up for herself. That moment when a ‘no’ reverberates. When you refuse to comply. When you refuse to go with the order.
  • The buckets had a contact mic underneath that picked up the sounds of the drips and amplified them. And the sound was manipulated to make it deeper. We gave them bass so they sounded like a drum. And the drips were going at different rates, one was at three seconds, one was at 2.5 seconds and one was every minute.
  • In the Macy Gray song, the walls collapse and the madness gives one possibility. I’m thinking about the buckets filling up, slowly, drip by drip, and eventually overflowing, spilling out and filling the whole space. And then the walls crack and suddenly it’s open. Suddenly, there’s light and possibility.
  • I’ve been thinking a lot of mental instability, which is an ongoing theme in my work. I’ve been looking at Fanon’s writings on the causes of madness. Madness as the result of socioeconomic and political factors.
  • Even in the South African context.
  • When it comes to our history… and how it has been written. How does one grapple with it? How does one attempt to be sane?
  • But what does that mean?
  • What does it mean to forgive politically and what does it mean to forgive personally? My father has Alzheimer’s so he forgets. And I have to forgive. To forgive him for forgetting. Forgive him for forgetting me. But what does it mean? Is it just wanting things to continue? What about recognition? What about adjustment? Chis Hani’s wife [Limpho Hani] comes to mind in her refusal to forgive, her refusal to just comply. Because fine, time has moved on, but what does it mean to still be in this body? To be the one left with the memory? What does it mean to remember.
  • So it contains the memory of the other structure, of the burning. And this is reflected on to the mirrors, which reflect it on to another mirror, but maybe losing something each time. Maybe not losing, but omitting. It seems continuous but each time you move, it breaks your position of encountering the story. You’re given one particular angle, but as soon as you move, it collapses.
  • It was madness, but this beautiful delirium in which he advocates killing yourself. Killing yourself as in breaking down the thing that holds you back. When you’re no longer the thing that people say you are, you’ve successfully killed yourself. That you no longer exists, but now you are free. So what do you have when all you have is nothing? Nothing can be beautiful. It can be liberation.
  • My work developed out of a paranoid expression of drawing boundaries between things private and things public, and an obsessive safekeeping of such.
  • I spent many hours in Hämeenkyrö smelling various herbs, meditating, swimming, laughing, and drinking tea with the family at Frantsila Herb Farm. I remember drinking water cupped in my hand – water directly from the spring, listening, making new songs… it was very relaxing. I was also learning a lot about traditional herbs and medicinal plants.
  • I was thinking primarily about dreaming, and about how I/we can dream better. I wanted to help myself and others to let go of the kind of thinking that holds us back from dreaming and instead rekindle deep thinking, to focus on how the herbs feel in our bodies, and to become slowly aware of their physiological effects. I hoped this would help us to relax more and allow the dreaming to come through.
  • I hope to dream to connect with the various parts of myself, especially those parts that are silenced. I also see dreaming as a way to then connect with others, and to realise my interconnectedness with others, that they are also a part of myself. It makes me wonder what the easiest way might be to speak to (an)other life form, and whether that life form is also a part of me. In a dream space, I feel it may be easier to speak, converse and to heal.
  • Sometimes it’s more about resting. Things flow easier when there’s less pressure.

Quote About Her

[edit]
  • What struck us was the way in which Dineo managed to make work that was very personal, intimate even, but did so with very common materials.
  • Her work revolves around the process of creation, rather than a belief in research or a particular canon. Simply put, she learns what the piece will be by making it.
  • We were drawn to her nuanced and delicate work at the sixth edition of the Marrakech Biennale last year and are thrilled by working with her this year in Rotterdam to place a bookend to our Para | Fictions series.
[edit]
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Dineo_Seshee_Bopape&oldid=3996874"