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."

Life

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.
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. 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.
In 2018 she was part of the 10th Berlin Biennale, curated by Gabi Ngcobo and a curatorial team that includes Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses, Thiago de Paula Souza and Yvette Mutumba. Her installation, entitled Untitled , 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.