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.

Quotes

• “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.”
  • Massara, Kathleen (6 April 2009). "Detritus and Drawings: The Art of Dineo Seshee Bopape". Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 22 March 2025.
• "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."
  • Africa, Art South (23 September 2015). "In Conversation with Dineo Seshee Bopape". Art Africa Magazine. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
• "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."
  • "Dineo Seshee Bopape: 〰️ [when spirituality was a baby]". Contemporary And (in German). Retrieved 24 February 2023.

Quote About Her

• “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."
  • Massara, Kathleen (6 April 2009). "Detritus and Drawings: The Art of Dineo Seshee Bopape". Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 22 March 2025.
• “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.”
  • "Dineo Seshee Bopape: 〰️ [when spirituality was a baby]". Contemporary And (in German). Retrieved 24 February 2023.