Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Artist (on the cover)
Bogosi Sekhukhuni has always made work that appears to be sci-fi, constructing nearfuture visions of how localised culture and interpersonal dynamics might look if the politics of the near-past or current epoch were allowed to persist or be destroyed.
To Sekhukhuni, science fiction is “less about predicting the future and more about acknowledging the extreme present, but also fantasising and imagining. Innovation can come out of that.” Much of his work uses cutting-edge technology or networks and aesthetics popular on the leftof-centre web.
Through powerful, humour-tinged internet-driven works from 2014 onwards, Sekhukhuni has made a refreshing impact on an unsatisfying and technically archaic conversation around identity politics and South Africa’s contemporary cultural condition.
Part of this work included developing dad bots, critiquing white South Africans’ underhanded insultliments (an insult disguised as a compliment) to people of colour and drawing on cultish religious symbolism and Tumblrisms to install his ideas of himself and those he identified with into globalised virtual worlds.
Through his work with artists’ collective CUSS, 89plus (an international platform that fosters artists born in, or after, 1989) and NTU, he has pushed his work into a certain kind of futurism, but never at the risk of being ahistorical. His research group, Open Time Coven, purports to do the ostensibly disconnected work of “investigating emergent technologies and repressed African spiritual philosophies”.
This has, it seems, been building up and refining towards a richer, more refined and congruous narrative that will no doubt be demonstrated in his first Stevenson gallery solo show next month, titled Simunye Summit 2010, something he describes as both “the closing of a chapter and a new beginning” in his work.
This new work has been driven by an exploration into South African Defence Force “covert operations into biochemical warfare that developed in the 1980s, in particular the chemical warfare laboratories under Project Coast”.
He has continued to explore many of the narrative threads of his earlier work, but explains :“I’ m trying to unpack some of these concepts in real applicable ways to my practice. I’ve been in a process of healing and recovery and that’s something
“I feel it needs to be recorded, to generate more conversation around this state of being a lot of people go through.”