dineo seshee bopape

the eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye

MICHAEL STEVENSON

29 JULY – 4 SEPTEMBER 2010

dineo seshee bopape

the eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye

feelin cosmic

grass green/sky blue

god dear (part 1)

f for flowers

flowers for modjadji

immaterial

flower blur

eartha kitt

they went that way

yoh what’s this now and

sparkle tree

flowers for tv

green treeeee flowr

light beautiful

build a house.

garden flowers2

crystal night

tree sky

blue

HOW deep is your love

chickens

DSCN3664

flower1

wine glass flowers

flowers22

garden

WINDO GARDEN

xiluva

a ke itsi kits

tree string

bright light

cuts

eclipsed

elephant ears

flower garden

flower shop

tree night

leaves

green tree

green treeeee

ground

killer night

leavezz

my my

pine tree w sky

savannah park

sky sea

sky tress

string tree light at bottom

SV400026

tent in grass

tree in blu

treees sky

queen of necklace sketch II in 3 parts

ge ba ba nea

something special

winnie’s lace

alter

ke tsa diphoofolo tsa go hlasela pelo

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3

sparkle tree, flower garden, wine

glass flowers, flowers for tv, queen

of necklace sketch II part 3, tree sky

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5

f for flowers, immaterial, flowers for modjadji

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god dear (part 1), queen of necklace sketch II part 2 and 3

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queen of necklace sketch II part 1, night tree,

garden flowers2, eartha kitt, immaterial

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grass green/sky blue, flower, blue, flowers for modjadji, eartha kitt

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green treeeee flowr, alter, garden

flowers2, eartha kitt, flower blur, tent

in grass, blue, flower garden, sky sea

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bright light, killer night, pine tree w sky

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queen of necklace sketch II part 2, crystal night

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a ke itsi kits, green treeeee, queen of necklace sketch II part 1

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something special, ge ba ba nea,

queen of necklace sketch II part 3

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feelin cosmic, winnie’s lace

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the eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye

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savannah park, light beautiful, they went that way,

queen of necklace sketch II part 3, ge ba ba nea,

grass green/sky blue, tree in blu

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My work is a negotiation of love, hate, mistakes, intentions, tensions, passion, intensity, boredom

and frustrations. I converse with today and yesterday, forever, as they negotiate spaces in

consciousness. The result of this is almost always fragmentary/fragmented. – Dineo Seshee

Bopape, ‘About my work…’, 2004

Dineo Seshee Bopape likes things – o rata dilo – uthanda izinto. This liking of things or

‘thingness’ is not the same as being easily excited by fads of the moment. If the infamous

adjective ‘tjatjarag’ were without the negative connotation, referring to one who is excitable,

hyperactive and over-zealous in an annoying way, I would use it to describe Bopape’s approach

to her visual collages.

Bopape’s practice defies categorisation. It is in place all over the place, obsessively, passionately,

intensely… Her installations are loaded with what she refers to as ‘effects’ – something similar

to perfumes (like Chanel No 5) worn to match a certain mood, day or season. Her obsessions

are seldom located within one recognisable space, time or zone. They are temporal and are

not to be distanced from life itself, the general ways of doing things – cooking, loving, dressing,

etc. As she has remarked, ‘real life requires one to perform many adjectives… 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.’1

Bopape collides things, making them perform a multitude of (temporal) possibilities out in the

open. Her installations are like infinite life and spatial choices, a gathering of objects that play

against each other and thus continuously construct and dismantle each other’s narratives.

the personal effects of dineo bopape

Gabi Ngcobo

1 Bopape in an interview with Natalie

Hegert, http://www.artslant.com/ny/

artists/rackroom/57689

and other references

We have unexpectedly arrived at quite an interesting idea of the object and objectivity.

Activating the thing means perhaps to create an objective – not as a fact, but as the task of

unfreezing the forces congealed within the trash of history. – Hito Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You and

Me’, e-flux journal # 15, 04/2010

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Her digitally manipulated images bear what Hito Steyerl calls ‘the bruises of [their] crashes

with politics and violence’,2 bruises that are also located within the ‘imperfection’ of the image,

bearing the ‘traces of… rips and transfers’. They are her recollections of history, but we should

not forget that Bopape likes to remember things in her own way. Through ‘her’ images, still and

moving, she invites us to reconsider our yearning for a value based on authenticity.

Drawn from the artist’s statements over six years, the following critical points – accompanied

by passages from recent and historical texts – illuminate the location of Bopape’s ‘effects’.

Effect # 1 (organs without bodies)

in the ‘beginning’ of my practice i was thinking a lot about baggage, historical, social, personal...

the weight of it all became too much but the shape of it i was still interested in... plastic bags/

bubbles, balloons...

that balloons are filled with nothing

that they fill a shape and some space...

perhaps it is the trace of the baggage that left its imprint on me

the trace of the trauma – turning an invisible yet present thing into nothing

trying to wipe it off, to dismantle it – yet there lies its trace

uncontainable in any shape: it is nothing

Effect #2 (the thing in itself)

i am interested in the idea of nothing, ‘it’s nothing’

thingness, and no thingness,

situations saturated with distortions, perhaps trauma: memory/time/distortion/holes that one

jumps through to go to the other side.

the thing is the central character of this narrative… there is a collision that happens, some type

of disco of effects, a disco within/of the affected object

saturated

‘However, an object which isn’t an object is not nothing. One becomes obsessed by its

immanence, its void, to trace the mark of this void, and within the limits of indifference to

play the game according to the mysterious rules of indifference.’ – Jean Baudrillard, ‘Objects,

Images, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Illusion’, 1997

2 Hito Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You and

Me’ in e-flux journal #15, 04/2010

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Perhaps the thing is how to make a story, one coherent story,

How to narrativise an event

Events that are somehow free of the historic

That have not yet been through the historicization process, or are in the midst of being

historicized – made to a particular logic

Effect # 3 (no event, no document, no history)

If the work is the event,

How does one document it after?

How is it historicized?

And which version is the true depiction of the event -

Is it valid now to document installations in black and white?

Or to manipulate the pics?

But what if the pics are bad? I am a bad photographer ie I cannot photograph things ‘as they are’

but I am more able to edit them how I remember them and how I would like to memorise them

Effect # 4 (the dematerialisation of an event [object/time])

i am interested in a dematerialisation of an event,

the politic of making an event, of framing time, organising things to form a particular sense

there is some sort of a decay of a linearity

go swele dikota, go shetje melora

(the firewood has burned, all that’s left are the ashes)

to displace history. memory. a fantasy. the story...

‘The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class

society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has

been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into

accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The

image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at

the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea

in its very becoming.’ – Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux journal # 10, 11/2009)

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to wobble the frame and to elasticate an event.

Effect # 5 (feelin cosmic is…)

…space.

which is one of my primary concerns especially in the videos and some of the more recent

studio investigations... visual space and the space beyond the visual, digital space, political

space, fantasy space/the space of the intangible, the space of beauty (utopia and politics of

beauty), the metaphysical... the space of memory, space occupied by images...

i am interested in the space within video, if there is space within the virtual – how deep does it

go? how far can a sound recede or an image, how much further can the real be? perhaps it is

also a question of metaphysics... and trying to draw a type of timeline

Effect # 6 (the door to the other side)

the portal, zoom lens, pipe, tunnel, the peephole, the lens, unconditional saturation, a disco

of effects… there is nothing, only effect and affectation, the flower could be anything – but it

is also particular, a character (substance of the things not seen), there is the romance of the

story and its origins, its co-ordinates seem to not coincide, lacking THE romance to make it real.

perhaps what makes it real is its effects, its trace, its mirror. it’s about space, the depth of field,

the distance between here and there, this and that time, the space within a mirror

once upon a time the first people beginning a tale, a narrative/story – implying that there is a

middle and an end but what do they call each other?

an echo immersed in the sieve

Effect # 7 (the space of memory)

the space of memory, space occupied by images...

and how do objects function within a space – the materiality of space: the space of memory

and of the haptic digital?

‘For years people have been concerned with what goes on inside the frame. Maybe there’s

something going on outside the frame that could be considered an artistic idea.’

– Robert Barry, 1968

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i set up situations within which the objects are ‘made’ to perform – poetically in sight of each

other – and also in which an event in memory is re-performed in the present, devoid from

original context.

together with the videos, they collectively produce a site for a disrupted narrative, an

orchestral discordant mess/harmony of small stories or fragments of a language that would

thereafter be dismantled.

………………………………………

i keep thinking a lot about the shembe people’s aesthetics... the white painted rocks used in

both urban and rural areas... but most especially in the urban areas, to temporarily demarcate

a space that would function as a spiritual zone... a temporary church... an ephemeral space,

bubble... arena – within which that spiritual event/activity is to take place...

i guess it is like constructing a tent.

‘Finally I can tell generations and generations

‘That SHEMBE is the way’

– Lucky Dube, Shembe is the Way

‘William James thought that a necessary ingredient of memory is “the revival in the mind of

an image or copy of the original event” (Principles of Psychology, I, 649). And Russell says:

“Memory demands an image” (The Analysis of Mind, p186). Beyond the general agreement of

memory theorists on the necessity for an image, some of them have held that “the present

mental occurrence in remembering” must contain additional components. Certain feelings

must accompany or characterize the image. One can deduce the nature of the feeling from the

problems that have to be solved. For example, if I have an image is it an image of something I

remember? Should I refer the image to the past or the future? Why should I give it one reference

rather than another? Now if there were such “a feeling of pastness” it would, apparently, solve

the problem. For if that feeling should accompany an image then I shall refer the image to the

past; if not, not.’ – Norman Malcolm, ‘Memory and Representation’ in Noûs, Vol 4, Feb 1970

Gabi Ngcobo is an independent curator, writer and artist

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Catalogue no 53 August 2010

Front cover feelin cosmic

MICHAEL STEVENSON

Buchanan Building

160 Sir Lowry Road

Woodstock 7925

Cape Town, South Africa

Tel +27 (0)21 462 1500

info@michaelstevenson.com

www.michaelstevenson.com

Editor Sophie Perryer

Design Gabrielle Guy

Photography Mario Todeschini

Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town

Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981 in Polokwane, South Africa. She is a graduate of the

Durban Institute of Technology (2004) and De Ateliers in Amsterdam (2007), and completed an

MFA with Columbia University, New York, in May 2010. She was the winner of the 2008 MTN New

Contemporaries Award. She was one of two African artists included on The Generational: Younger

than Jesus, the first triennial exhibition of the New Museum in New York (2009). She has held solo

exhibitions at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2005 and 2008); Mart House Gallery in Amsterdam

(2007 and 2009); and the Thami Mnyele Studio, Amsterdam (2008). Recent group shows include

Siren at Anna Kustera Gallery, New York (2010); PASS-AGES: references & footnotes at the old Pass

Office in Johannesburg (2010); Ampersand at Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010); Act IX: Let Us

Compare Mythologies at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2010); Life Less Ordinary: Performance and

display in South African art at the Fotogallery in Cardiff, Wales, and Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham,

UK (2009 and 2010); Dada South? at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town

(2009); Rebelle: Art and Feminism 1969-2009 at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, The

Netherlands (2009); Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art at The Stenersen

Museum, Oslo (2009); and Black Womanhood: Images, icons, and ideologies of the African body,

Davis Museum, Wellesley College, MA, USA (2008). She has previously exhibited at Michael

Stevenson on the group shows In the Making: Materials and process (2005); Disguise: The art of

attracting and deflecting attention (2008); and Summer 2009/10: Projects.

Artist’s acknowledgments:

mama le papa

daniel bozhkov, fia, jon k.+ kara for insights*

+the dreammakers/

joan legalamitlwa, joost bosland, andrew da conceicao, petros sethoa and all at

michael stevenson

Works:

the eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye, 2010, installation including digital videos (feelin

cosmic, 2008, 1 min 34 sec, sound; f for flowers, 2010, 1 min, sound; grass green/sky blue, 2008, 6

min 52 sec, sound; god dear [part 1], 2009, 4 min 15 sec, sound); digital drawings (lightjet prints on

metallic paper, various dimensions); sculptures (queen of necklace sketch II in 3 parts, something

special, 2010, mixed media, various dimensions); wall collage (alter, 2010, mixed media, 240 x 428 x

26 cm); and painting (ke tsa diphoofolo tsa go hlasela pelo, 2010, acrylic on board, 90 x 180cm)

the eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye, 2009, SD digital video, 11 min 38 sec, sound

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MICHAEL STEVENSON