Exhibition

Artes Mundi 9: Dineo Seshee Bopape

15 Mar 2021 – 5 Sep 2021

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
11:00 – 17:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 17:00
Thursday
11:00 – 17:00
Friday
11:00 – 17:00
Saturday
11:00 – 17:00
Sunday
11:00 – 17:00

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Chapter

Cardiff
Wales, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Canton Library
  • Ninian Park
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Event map

Dineo Seshee Bopape’s expansive practice deals with socio-political notions of memory—from the personal to the collective, to the known and unknown —narration and representation as interrelated forms.

About

She demonstrates an obsession for recollection and of how personal belongings or everyday objects might critically carry significance and embed history beyond their daily use. Her work often utilises a diverse range of commonplace, elemental materials such as soil, bricks, and timber with found objects and archival images, video, and sound, to develop dense and powerful installations. Materials such as earth, air or water are given tangible form.

Bopape has produced a series of new, immersive works whose installation materially and conceptually connects African and US locations such as Achimota Forest, Accra, Ghana, James River, Richmond, Virginia, and the Mississippi River at New Orleans. Clay and soil from these places join with that from the Île de Gorée off the Senegal coast at Dakar—infamous as a departure point from Africa for the Atlantic slave trade—to create Master Harmoniser, a collection of over 1,000 drawings. This work combines with (Nder brick) ___ in process (Harmonic Conversions) to act as an homage to the sacrifice that Nder women in North Senegal underwent to avoid being taken as slaves.

Soil, objects, drawing and sound are presented in spaces with walls covered in washes of soil from Welsh sacred sites. Presented at both the National Museum Cardiff and Chapter, Gorree (song): Thobela: harmonic conversions is a sound work that is part lament, part evocation, part acknowledgment of ancestors. Linking place, histories and reaching across time, as a whole these works draw together the celestial and the earthly, the bodily and the metaphysical, the personal and collective, into a space of acknowledgment and healing, to create a potent atmosphere that questions that which becomes forgotten and what should be remembered.

About the Artist
Dineo Seshee Bopape, born 1981, South Africa, lives and works in Johannesburg. She is represented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg

About Artes Mundi
Artes Mundi is an internationally focused arts organisation that identifies, recognises and supports contemporary visual artists who engage with the human condition, social reality and lived experience.

It remains the UK’s largest contemporary art prize with £40,000 prize money and has previously been awarded to Theaster Gates (2015), John Akomfrah (2017), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2019).

This year’s shortlist was selected by a jury made up of Cosmin Costinas, Executive Director and Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong and Artistic Director of Kathmandu Triennale 2020; Elvira Dyangani-Ose, Director of The Showroom gallery in London; and Rachel Kent, Chief Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

More information: www.artesmundi.org

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