For her exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Dineo Seshee Bopape (born in 1981 in South Africa, lives in Johannesburg) has conceived an installation reflecting on feelings, psychic dissolution and weight of context. The video of the song “Feelings” performed by Nina Simone (1976, live in Montreux Jazz Festival) together with a consideration of Bessie Head’s novel, A question of power (1974), are the starting points of her research. Dineo Seshee Bopape explores with her installation the subjective question of affects by bringing together videos and depictions of pieces focused on the body engulfed by emotion in personal and in socio political contexts.

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“If [Dineo Seshee Bopape] 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. (…)”

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