Dineo Seshee Bopape

born 1981, Polokwane, South Africa; lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

Dineo Seshee Bopape examines personal, collective, and planetary memory across a practice that includes video, sound, light, and elemental matter like soil, crystals, and herbs. She combines materials in alchemical ways, creating works that address the residual wounds of historical trauma inflicted by racial and colonial violence against people and the Earth.

Bopape’s immersive installation, Master Harmoniser (ile aye, moya, là, ndokh), is an animated video and sound environment made from soil and water collected from places that played historical roles in the transatlantic slave trade: Virginia, Louisiana, Senegal, Ghana, and South Africa. Bopape’s dizzying animation conjures the memory of enslavement and forced migration that connects these dispersed places across time and geography.

The tactile, visual marks that comprise the animation are a response to widely circulated abolition-era images depicting the heavily scarred back of a formerly enslaved man in Louisiana, known as either Peter or Gordon. Sounds of water, wind, human cries, and music accompany the imagery and amplify the dislocation, horror, and resistance that Peter’s story of enslavement and escape embodies. Bopape titled this work ile aye, moya, là, ndokh—the four elements (earth, wind, fire, and water) in four different African languages (Yoruba, Nguni/Sepedi, Ga, and Wolof, respectively)—conjuring the multivocal tongue spoken by the African diaspora and the relationship of ancestral memory to other potent, foundational life forces.

Mud from Pacific Northwest waterways covers the walls in the Henry installation, inviting viewers to recollect relationships between this region and global histories. The story of Charles Mitchell, an enslaved boy in Washington Territory who escaped to freedom in British Columbia in September 1860, appears as a footnote in the history of the Pacific Northwest, but is revelatory of the region’s entangled history with slavery, Black disenfranchisement, and resilience.