Artist Dineo Seshee Bopape’s latest work focuses on water and memory – ARTnews.com

Artist Dineo Seshee Bopape’s latest work begins with what on the surface looks like a direct call from curator Chus Martínez: Come and swim with me. The site was a world away from a South African artist: off the Solomon Islands in Oceania. But the invitation came close to home. “I’m not a good swimmer, but I’ve been careful about it,” said Bubabi.

Bubabi ended up spending two weeks in the Solomon Islands and describes her time there as caring. She said it was an opportunity to “engage in a conversation in the water with our bodies, with our souls as well, and engage in the space of dreams.” “There is something in that sensory calling, through all the layers of thought, memory, practice, retreat, rehabilitation, and confidence.”

The curator’s mentor – who Martinez said was the result of a “longstanding admiration” for Popebee’s work – was part of a residency program set up by TBA21-Academy, a multidisciplinary arts organization with a focus on supporting artists and curators in conducting research, creating exhibitions and programs that address the climate crisis , particularly with regard to how it affects the world’s oceans.

Martinez described TBA21-Academy as an entity “committed to expanding the understanding of the relationship between science and art and the imperative to act in climate emergencies.” The point of working together is “for all of us – as a trustee, as an organization, as a public, as a community, as an educational project – to understand, what can we do? How can we open up and see new ways that differ from the ones that have been presented to us?”

The artwork that resulted from Boubab’s association with the Academy, titled Ocean! What if no change is your desperate task?is a three-channel video installation with eight speakers currently on display at TBA21 – Academy Ocean Space, a Venice home base located in the Basilica of San Lorenzo.

Across the three screens are different shots of the moving water – dark blue, turquoise, crystalline sparkling in the sun, reddish and dark brown. It cuts quickly, and the soundtrack begins to build up. A hand, wearing a dozen or so bracelets, soon plunges into the water. Then he hammered two hands into the water, followed by various objects that floated: a sliced ​​pineapple, half a smokey coconut peel, lemon slices, green leaves, potatoes, pink flowers, sections of tangerines, a handful of bananas. At various points, the camera drops below the surface of the water and we see fish swimming next to objects as they descend to the ocean floor. Sometimes the sound of the drums becomes all-encompassing.

The significance of this is ambiguous. Are we witnessing ritual waters, or do they represent pollutants harming the waters of the planet? When a creamy white liquid is added to water, it creates an abstraction that feels innately beautiful—though adding it, the mere presence of it, would likely be a sinister thing.

The video was inspired by the experience of Bubabi in the Solomon Islands, where she received “messages that came from the water,” she said. One touching moment during her time was when a local man in a canoe approached the TBA21 boat and asked Bopape to sing him a song. Right away what came to our mind was a South African reggae musician “Slave” Lucky Dube.

“I kept asking myself why out of all the songs this song came to my mind,” the artist said. “I sat with that for a while.”

As she gazes out into the water, Pupape also remembers a notorious Civil War-era image of the enslaved man known as Gordon (although that probably wasn’t his name), sitting in a wooden chair with scars of brutal leather on display. .

“I kept seeing the lacerations on the back of the enslaved man named Gordon,” said Bubabee. “In the photo, his back to the audience and these scars that look like mountains on his back but are also like waves of water. I kept seeing the water and seeing the scars made an impression on me.”

Bubabi realized that “this was a message that was passed on to me to think about. Messages continued to arrive through the site, through dreams as well.” After one of these dreams, she woke up crying. During the dream I heard a song that is now part of the work soundtrack. One line translates into English: “My love is alive, alive, alive.”

Once she had completed her time in the Solomon Islands, Bubabi felt that she needed to spend more time by the ocean – “to think of the water itself and my relationship to it: the water of the ocean, the water in my body, also as the water in our collective body or in our collective consciousness, we are all in relation to one another.” Some and with water, and what love has to do with that, where love lies in this respect.”

She ended up visiting other bodies of water around the world, which included shots of it Ocean!. I traveled to the Pacific off Columbia, Ghana, Senegal, Richmond, New Orleans and, most importantly, Jamaica, where I completed another residency at TBA21’s Alligator Head Foundation, a marine conservation organization. “Jamaica became the gateway through which the business was born — almost the birth canal,” Pupabe said.

By visiting these various waterways, Popeye soon realized that she was “tracking the transatlantic slave trade route,” a new theme in her work that continues a thread running through her artistic practice: “the flow of memory.” She attributes this focus to her upbringing during the 1970s in South Africa, under apartheid, in a culture, she says, that focuses on “forgetting and wanting to forget — pushing everyone to forgive and forget.”

And she continued, “What things do we remember? What things are also forgotten? How do I remember myself, with myself? The ocean and water have this ability to remember oneself, nurture or rehabilitate. What things are part of the present but almost ghosts? How do I call my colleagues To hear those ghosts more clearly, to be at the level where we can heal?”

“Memory, Denio said, is not a passive function of the brain,” Martinez said. “It is not that you have memories, that you remember them because you have them. It is an active act of imagination because you begin to put things into the world and then they become a memory again.”

“It is a spiritual and political rebellion that we must remember, lest we forget what one is asked to forget,” Boubabi added.

The exhibition in Venice also includes a table with dozens of sculptures, as well as five drawings that visitors can visualize via augmented reality on iPads. “They really add that this is a spectral relationship with things you don’t see,” Martinez said. “Things you don’t see are spirits, but also problems you don’t see. You can see a drawing, but it could be a problem.”

Martinez sees the exhibition, and the TBA21-Academy project as a whole, mapping out exactly what our relationship, role, and responsibility should be when it comes to helping ensure our water’s sustainable livelihoods.

“You realize that it is this infinite number of small actions that make up the universe that you need to respect, and you have to live with,” she said. “I think after this 17-minute experience, you totally understand coexistence. That was my response. I thought, Wow, I’m connected, and that’s inside me. It demands understanding and commitment.”