Dineo Seshee Bopape
Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone
Interested in the collection of object and their potential to evoke various emotional reactions in the audience, Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone is an invitation into the limitless netherworld of the unsaid and unspoken. Exploring the metaphysical landscape of secrets, lies and psychosexual ambivalence, this work is an attempt to create a site for contemplation. The video ventures to provoke a rhythmic trance through transporting the mind into a distant illusionary world constructed by vignettes of fractured spaces. Bopape interrogates the notion of space within video through a celestial journey to a contemporary sublime disturbed by constant movement and disruption. Through employing images and sound that are loud and dissonant and displaced, Bopape isolates her references creating a sense of awe, anxiety and dysphoria within the chaos. Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone challenges the viewer’s understanding and familiarity to contemporary objects, animals and landscapes.
“My work is a search through a minefield of metaphors in spaces: spaces of memory and of the present, spaces of the real and the imagined, the hidden and revealed. It is an attempt to conceal and mask, whilst simultaneously to peel away the husk and layers that crust over secretive stories embedded in objects and in people.” – Dineo Seshee Bopape