Abstract
This PhD thesis is an exploration of affect, objecthood and blackness
in the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape (b. 1981), — a South African artist
living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa. Consideration is
given to the ways in which Bopape engages with coloniality and antiblackness
in South Africa through video, installation and the making of
various other kinds of objects and images. The study elaborates on
how Bopape’s works renounce and refuse any definitive and fixed
intimations of historical processes. It is argued that her works trouble
delimited narratives or representations of black subjectivities.
Bopape’s practice, it is proposed, signifies a grammar of black feminist
futurity that posits discontinuity as a gesture that might allow for, or
potentially anticipate, the possibility of an alternative and self-reflexive
utopia. It is explained that this utopia is not built on traditional forms of
protest but is rather a gesture that is critical of its own stances.
While an overview of Bopape’s oeuvre is provided, a particular focus is
the bodies of work she has created between 2013 and 2024. Attention
is given to Bopape’s film Is I Am Sky (2013), as well as her installation
Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings] (2016-2018), and its display in
the context of the tenth Berlin Biennale in 2018. In addition, the study
offers a comparative analysis of two iterations of Lerole: Footnotes (The
Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting) (2017-ongoing), as well as
engaging with Bopape’s iterative soil works from 2016 and 2017.
This thesis interrogates the ways in which Bopape’s work negotiates
issues of power, subjugation, and their effects in the present. It reflects
on how her works function as allegories of the affective present,
positioning themselves as discontinuous fragments that comprehend
and refuse the violence of history. It is argued that, rather than negating
the realm of the unstable, her works allude to the generative capacity
of incoherency and chaos as possible modalities to comprehend the
current social order.