STEVENSON is pleased to present new and recent video works by Dineo Seshee Bopape in her first solo exhibition in this city.
The show is presented under the rubric of the sePedi phrase lešobana!! lešobana! lešobana!! (le bulegile); lešobana! lešobana! lešobana!! (go phunyegile), alluding to a sudden small opening or abyss, a perforation or puncture - a reference to holes, eyes, circular frames, the acts of looking, framing and editing, as well as ideas of rupture and rapture. The exhibition comprises four video works and installation elements, transforming the gallery into a hyper-cosmic world of floating screens and digitally altered realities. Interested in 'the space within video', Bopape asks: 'if there is space within the virtual, how deep does it go? How far can a sound or an image recede?' Perhaps, she suggests, it is also 'a question of metaphysics, and trying to draw a type of parallel timeline'.
Bopape has never been one to shy away from bending the fabric of 'the reel' to create fantastical realms of distorted beauty. One such work making its South African debut on the show is her three-channel video work, they act as lovers: microwave cosmic background: so massive that its decay opened the ultimate hole from which the universe emerged: effect no.55, 2 ends of a bent mirror, of which Bopape writes:
there is nothing, only effect and affectation...
there is nothing and 'the nothing' (the immaterial thing that exists but can not be named or even pointed at) that exists in the actual ....a disco of effects/affect
...an 'echo immersed in the sieve'
In addition, Bopape presents three single-channel digital videos: the problem of beauty, intermission 2//tv life and the light was just like this. These video pieces collectively take the viewer on a kaleidoscopic journey through memory, trauma, time, ecstasy, virtual space and the sublime.
Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981 in Polokwane. She is a 2007 graduate of De Ateliers in Amsterdam and in May 2010 completed an MFA at Columbia University, New York. She was the winner of the 2008 MTN New Contemporaries Award. In 2010 she received a Toby Fund Award from Columbia University. She has shown her work in major international exhibitions including Younger than Jesus, the first edition of a new triennial at the New Museum, New York (2009). Recent solo shows have taken place in Amsterdam and Naples in addition to her first solo show at Stevenson, which took place in Cape Town in 2010. Recent group shows include Pass(ages) 2010 in Johannesburg; 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 (2010), and Rebelle: Art and Feminism 1969-2009 at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009). In 2011 she has been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Sober & Lonely Institute in Johannesburg and the Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 11 August, from 6 to 8pm.
Please note that this exhibition will close on Thursday 15 September.
The gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and Saturday from 10am to 1pm.
