Dineo Seshee Bopape

Dineo Seshee Bopape 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." Among other venues, Bopape's work has been shown at the New Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the 12th Biennale de Lyon. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Mart House Gallery, Amsterdam; Kwazulu Natal Society of Arts, Durban; and Palais de Tokyo. Her work in the collection of the Tate.

Early life and education Bopape was born in Polokwane, South Africa, in 1981. She studied painting and sculpture at the Durban Institute of Technology, and graduated from De Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2007. In 2010 she completed an MFA at Columbia University in New York.

Notable Installations and Exhibitions In 2011, Bopape had a solo exhibition, the eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye. Her work was also featured in the Geography of Somewhere exhibition at the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa that same year.

Her piece but that is not the important part of the story, which first premiered at the Lyon Biennial in 2013, The piece would then be set on fire, on which the artist says "It really started as me wanting to burn the memory of another work, an un-solvable riddle. That’s why it started with the burning, with wanting to make a new work." It was then re-installed at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Netherlands in October of that year, and Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon in 2018. Her installation, entitled Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings], 2016–18 was located in the lower level of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Set among debris, and made specially for the biennale, the work was bathed in orange light and includes among its videos a film about a white man raping a black woman and clips of legendary artist Nina Simone’s mental breakdown on stage.

When Collective, a new gallery in the City Observatory in Edinburgh, United Kingdom opened in November 2018, Bopape was commissioned to create a new work. Her piece When Spirituality Was a Baby was made of soil and timber.

Recognition and awards Bopape was the winner of the 2008 MTN New Contemporaries Award, the recipient of a 2010 Columbia University Toby Fund Awards, the 2017 Sharjah Biennial Prize, and the winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017.