Dineo Seshee Bopape's Lerato le le golo Exhibition at Secession: Immersive Installations & Videos

This exhibition features the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape, exploring complex questions of memory, land, and the lived experiences of African peoples through immersive installations and videos. Her art, crafted from everyday materials, designs an indigenous aesthetic that articulates resilience and self-healing in the face of historical oppression.

Dineo Seshee Bopape's powerful installations and videos interrogate the history of her South African homeland, raising complex questions about memory and the dominion over land and bodies in relation to the lived experiences of African peoples. Her art is characterized by a search for a visual, sonic, and material language that designs an indigenous aesthetic. It articulates the resilience of African diaspora peoples and their capacity for self-healing, as well as the enduring strength with which they have long resisted, 'traversed', and liberated themselves from the violence of capitalist-patriarchal white supremacy. Bopape creates art from carefully selected everyday materials such as earth, clay, fabrics, plants, containers, colors, and digital media. Their material and symbolic properties often enter into dialogue with notions of politics, aesthetics, the metaphysics of self/thing/spirit and relationality, sovereignty, presence, home, land and water, language, song, and memory. For her exhibition at the Secession, Bopape developed a new installation that engages with the site, immersing visitors in another world with its powerful physicality. The space is touched by pink light and filled with the hum of honeybees. Domes and knee-high walls of rammed earth speak the language of fleeting things, taking form and receiving a place through the architecture of open-ended enclosures/courtyards found in some traditional African villages. These create a fluid spiral movement and structure between interior and exterior, towards the center of the work, offering an entrance—a portal. Circular depressions in the floor in one of the ensemble's centers reflect a cosmic constellation, creating links to earlier generations of the artist's works. Like earthenware bowls and jugs, they function, among other things, as containers, vessels, bodily orifices, or instruments of invocation and memorials, ideas of femininity, and satellites (of home: home soil/home earth).

Information about visiting the Secession, including opening hours, can be found on their website. Ticketing details are available via a link to their official shop, suggesting separate admission or booking may be required. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 6 PM.