OF LAND AND SOVEREIGNTY
Exploration of aboriginals’ struggles
South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape’s site-specific installation at the Darling Foundry is a monument to indigenous spirituality and homelands.
Bopape’s installation deals with self-determination and sovereignty, themes shared with aboriginal peoples in Canada and elsewhere.
“The concept of sovereignty resonates through references to the self, body and land, and the subject of land ownership, occupation, absence and reclamation,” said Dominique Fontaine, curator of the Darling exhibition.
Bopape’s installation consists of a large egg-shaped enclosure at one end of the main gallery, with objects relating to purification ceremonies placed in rows along the floor and on top of altar-like structures made of earth and straw.
The objects include herbs, feathers, dried flowers, seeds, candles, polished stones and crystals meant to create energy and to heal. There are also fist-sized pieces of fired clay, several bronze casts of Bopape’s uterus and small piles of dry soil, reminding us that we come from dust and will return to dust. In the air is an earthy incense of burning sage — used to create a meditative space, Fontaine said.
The enclosure itself, an elongated igloo-like structure that’s found in many African architectures, is a private temple that refers to fertility, Bopape said in an interview.
“You pray while pressing the clay” into the underlying structure, she said.
The herbs are for the health of the female reproductive system, Bopape said. And, she added, “for a grandmother who had stillborn children and children who died young at the time of South Africa’s 1913 Land Act that displaced blacks.”
The struggle of black people in South Africa under apartheid wasn’t about getting to use the same bathrooms as whites, she said. To Bopape, it was, and continues to be, about the dream of having land “that was theirs before it was taken from them,” but which is now unaffordable.
For Bopape, the altar-like blocks of earth are a narrative about land and sovereignty. One word in the Zulu language means both “voice” and “land,” she said.
Bopape squeezed clay in her fists to create the small ceramic pieces that are placed in rows throughout the installation. Fontaine writes that the gesture in making these objects is that of the black-power salute, which leaves a small hole between the fingers and the palm of the hand.
These voids in the centre of the clay pieces symbolize holes in memory, time and body, Bopape said. A prisoner on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held in a prison cell for 18 years, held up a fist of clay for visitors to see, signifying that he hadn’t forgotten the struggle, she added.
“These blocks of clay have the potential to build something or to (be thrown) as a weapon,” she said.
The installation implies the idea of the relationship of indigenous people with the land, “but formally, it is about the relationship of the sculpture to the space of the building,” Fontaine said as a reminder that whatever the symbolism of the pieces of the installation, it is a work of art.
Bopape told Fontaine she was interested in how memories of place and of trauma fade, giving “the sense that our reality is frail.”
The clay objects, which Bopape uses to document her presence, become metaphors for things that she cannot articulate, Fontaine writes.
Fontaine said she met Bopape when the latter was an artist-inresidence at the Darling Foundry in 2012. Fontaine became interested in Bopape’s research into land, the idea of presence and absence and nothingness.
“Nothingness is a philosophy of being and non-being and of possession and dispossession, power relationships and of being present in the world, of being in the space of infinity and multiplicity,” Fontaine said.
Bopape recently won the Future Generation Art Prize, given annually by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to an international artist under age 35. The foundation, which is based in Kyiv, Ukraine, has also selected several of the country’s representatives to the Venice Biennale.
“Art lets you be free,” said Pinchuk, a Ukrainian businessman and former politician, when Bopape was selected from a field of 21 artists to win the prize. “It even forces you to open up. This is so important.
“People in many countries are afraid. Politicians use this. Nations speak the language of threats. Contemporary art is the antidote.”
Bopape’s installation isn’t the only Montreal exhibit concerned with self-determination and sovereignty.
An aboriginal group called Wood Land School has taken over the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (sbcgallery.ca) to explore the meaning of sovereignty in exhibitions and events for all of 2017.