Description
Dineo Seshee Bopape (b. 1981) is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
This remarkable many-coloured screenprint has been commissioned especially for ArtThrob. It was printed at Caversham Press by Malcolm Christian, assisted by Alex Shabalala, in KwaZulu-Natal where Bopape worked in residence. Bopape’s work is characterised by an evocative and deeply personal interest in locating herself in space and time. This manifests as a dance between surface and screen, personal history, and the banality of ordinary objects and moments. In Chat-Scat, the television test pattern and quote from an online chat forum explore a particular immaterial aspect of the virtual techno-scape, whilst simultaneously claiming that space for the artist’s personal history.
BIOGRAPHY_
Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981 on a Sunday. If she were Ghanaian, her name would be Akosua/Akos for short. In the year of her birth, the Brixton riots took place; two people were injured when a bomb exploded in a Durban shopping centre. Bobby Sands dies, MTV is launched, the Boeing 767 makes its first air flight, Umkhonto we Sizwe performs numerous underground assault operations against the apartheid state. There was an earthquake in China that killed maybe 50 people. Hosni Mubarak was elected president of Egypt, there was a coup d’etat in Ghana. Princess Diana of Britain married Charles. Bob Marley dies. Apartheid SA invaded Angola. AIDS is identified/created/named. Salman Rushdie releases Midnight’s Children. In the region of her birth: Her paternal grandmother died. Julius Malema is born. Millions of people cried. Millions of people laughed! The world’s population was apparently at around 4,529-billion.
Bopape spent her youth in Limpopo in varying social situations. At 12 years of age she began to follow a hunger for an elsewhere, beginning with Durban where she spent some years and studied painting and sculpture. She is a 2007 graduate of De Ateliers in Amsterdam and in 2010 completed an MFA at Columbia University, New York. She was the winner of the 2008 MTN New Contemporaries Award, and the recipient of a 2010 Columbia University Toby Fund Award. She has shown her work in major and minor national and international exhibitions … Other events of the year of her birth and of her lifetime are perhaps too many to fully know.
