Selecting memory: The madnes

Dineo Seshee Bopape explores madness, myths and mirrors in her first solo exhibition in the US

Consider Dineo Seshee Bopape. Right now she is a voice. Disembodied. Streaming out from the screen. A blinking machine. The voice is rough with exhaustion. Gravelly at the bottom. Slow and languid at its core. She is a voice, somewhere there, and a screen with far too many tabs open, in need of rest somewhere there on the other side of the world.

It’s 7am in New York and the artist is up early for our video call. She’s there for her first solo show in the United States, and what kind of fates would have planned this timing? The United States are not so united.

Donald Trump of entrepreneurial, orange-faced racism is the nation’s most important citizen. His defeated opposition candidate, Hillary Clinton, is a self-proclaimed intersectional feminist with a history of buried rape scandals and a white husband who was deemed “the first black president of the US”. And the videos of the police killings that keep coming. Shot lo-fi on cellphones, sometimes there is a scream off camera. Or some other nondiegetic sound indicating the presence of another character. Something other than the black body, the bullets, the men in blue, the blood. Now here on your screen, playing within the safety and comfort of your home, your office, your car.

But back to this screen, to this sound and this voice. The work Bopape will be installing at Art in General in Brooklyn, New York, is a continuation of the work shown at the 32nd Saõ Paulo Biennale earlier this year.

“Well,” she elaborates. “It’s a continuation of all the work I do, I guess. I’m thinking about holes. About holes in memory. About how mirrors can provide holes, how they can perforate the illusion, break the linearity. A mirror can offer something different, a different perspective. An opportunity to go to the other side.”

The show, :indeed it may very well be the _____ itself, is centred on a set of dense, dark rectangular and round blocks of what looks to be soil or clay. In the blocks are holes, cavities and mounds of varying shapes and sizes. Some of the holes are implied: circles outlined in coloured chalk. In the cavities are gold leaves, herbs, petals, stones, tiny fist-shaped sculptures, gemstones, coal and little glass bottles filled with unnamed materials. On some of the blocks are chalk drawings that resemble Adinkra symbols.

“I’ll be working with soil and clay, and hopefully feathers.”

Bopape has not yet managed to locate the feathers she seeks. The quetzal with its brightly coloured plumage is found in mountainous Central American rainforests. There is folklore about the bird: the quetzal commits suicide in captivity.

This is but one myth mentioned by Bopape during the course of our conversation. In another, Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Montreal slave, razes the city to the ground while trying to escape with her lover.

“I’m interested in that moment of passion that sets everything around it alight. That saturation of pain, of no longer being willing to endure it. That is rebellion. I think of Khwezi, Fezeka. Of that rebellion spirit of standing up for herself. That moment when a ‘no’ reverberates. When you refuse to comply. When you refuse to go with the order.”

Madness among the rebels

Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth: “In the period of colonisation when it is not contested by armed resistance, when the sum total of harmful nervous stimuli overstep a certain threshold, the defensive attitudes of the natives give way and they Down to earth: The work Dineo Seshee Bopape is installing at Art in General in New York, is a continuation of the work

then find themselves crowding the mental hospitals. There is thus during this calm period of successful colonisation, a regular and important mental pathology which is the direct product of oppression.”

Consider Bopape. Consider insanity. Holes in the mind, in the memory. Psychic dissolution. Consider, perhaps, madness as a form of freedom.

Her 2016 show, Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings], saw the walls of a room in Palais de Tokyo in Paris wrapped in an orangeish, reddish

colour. In a corner, buckets placed at different levels (some on the ground, some elevated on plinths) slowly fill up with water dripping from the ceiling, one drop, drop, drop at a time.

“The buckets had a contact mic underneath that picked up the sounds of the drips and amplified them. And the sound was manipulated to make it deeper. We gave them bass so they sounded like a drum. And the drips were going at different rates, one was at three seconds, one was at 2.5 sec-

onds and one was every minute.”

The vessels accumulate liquid mass at an excruciating pace. Gradual, unhurried, but definite. One thinks of Chinese water torture. Of drops of water dripping on to the forehead, resulting eventually in a break of the conscious. In insanity.

“The dripping then was also drumming. Drumming as a call to action. As summoning. There’s a Macy Gray song I like called Oblivion and that song spins you around and spits you out. And that’s what I wanted with