- Artist
- Dineo Seshee Bopape born 1981
- Medium
- Video, projection, colour and sound
- Dimensions
- Duration: 17min, 48sec
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Emile Stipp 2014, accessioned 2016
- Reference
- T14556
Summary
is i am sky by Dineo Seshee Bopape is a single-screen video projection with sound that shows the artist’s face merging with her surroundings as she walks through a landscape. The video is shot in extreme close-up and from a low angle, so that the viewer can see the artist’s face and a restricted view of the trees, the ground, and the sky above. As she moves, the artist’s face fades in and out of view, appearing patchy as it is intercepted by the background scene. At times Bopape’s face doubles or triples, the skin of these additional faces obscured so that only the eyes, nose and mouth are visible. The video’s soundtrack consists of birds singing, tinkling noises, vocal music and drumbeats that repeat in fast patterns. As the video goes on, Bopape’s features begin to merge with spillages of colour, cosmic imagery and black space. The soundtrack slowly progresses towards crashing percussive sounds and sustained notes as the cosmic imagery takes over the frame, and the video ends with Bopape’s face almost entirely obscured. When displayed, the video is projected at a large scale in a dark room. The version held by Tate is number two in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof.
The work was conceived and filmed in San Francisco in 2011 when Bopape was undertaking an artist’s residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. She set out into the Californian landscape alone and recorded the footage for is i am sky with a small hand-held camera. As she walked, Bopape recorded herself singing using minimal equipment. She also recorded the sound of the wind while she sang, allowing the harsh Californian gusts to brush against her unprotected microphone.
Bopape made is i am sky in response to the trial of former African National Congress Youth League President Julius Malema that was taking place in South Africa in 2011. A prominent activist, Malema was convicted of hate speech after singing the contentious struggle song ‘Ayasaba Amagwala, dubuli bhunu’, which translates to ‘The cowards are scared. Kill the Boer [white farmer]’. In response, Bopape performed the African Cream Freedom Choir’s song ‘Hamba Kahle Mkhonto’ for Malema while filming herself walking through the landscape. This song was often sung during South African apartheid – the institutional racial oppression against the country’s BIPOC (Black, indigenous and people of colour) majority from the 1940s to the 1990s – and is widely sung at funerals in the country as a reconciliation and gesture towards farewell. In is i am sky, the soothing quality of Bopape’s singing voice contrasts with the abrasiveness of the wind, hinting at the resistance faced by those fighting for freedom of speech.
The title of the work refers to jazz composer Sun Ra’s 1972 poem ‘The Endless Realm’, which begins: ‘I have nothing / Nothing! / How really is I am…’. Bopape’s video echoes Sun Ra’s celebration of cosmic infinity as a frontier for Black liberation. As the work progresses, Bopape’s face becomes an expanding gateway into the vastness of the universe, and she increasingly blurs the markers of her identity. Describing the video, the artist has said: ‘I was trying to find a way of marrying the sky’, to merge with the ‘space that nothing occupies’ (Dineo Seshee Bopape, conversation with Tate curators, 2019). According to curator Portia Malatjie, through the chaotic merging of cosmic imagery with the face, sky, landscape, bursts of colour and sonic disorientation, is i am sky enacts further liberation by ‘construct[ing] an alternate existence where the memories of black people are made visible and given space to unfold’ (Malatjie 2019, p.7).
is i am sky was first exhibited in June 2013 in Bopape’s second solo show, Kgoro ya go tšwa: Even if you fall from a circle at Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. Reviewing the exhibition, critic Athi Mongezeleli Joja wrote, ‘[in] is i am sky, the issues of exiting and loss are profoundly suggested’ (Joja 2013, accessed 22 August 2022). This can be seen in the mourning song that Bopape sings, and in the shifting visibility and invisibility of her face throughout. Loss and departure are common themes in Bopape’s wider practice, which ranges from video, miniature paintings and drawings to large-scale, site-specific installations. In Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings] 2016–18 she explored issues of sexual violence in a room-based installation. Bathed in an orange hue, it was filled with scattered objects and videos including footage of the singer Nina Simone suffering a breakdown onstage as a result of bipolar disorder. Master Harmoniser 2021 is a collection of over 1,000 drawings connecting African and North American locations. The drawings feature a sea of waves and were made using clay and soil partly taken from the Island of Gorée off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, which was a departure point from the African continent for the Atlantic slave trade. Linking places and histories in a transhistorical manner in these works and in is i am sky, Bopape ensures that what has been forgotten can be remembered, seen and questioned.
Further reading
Athi Mongezeleli Joja, ‘Dineo Seshee Bopape at Stevenson in Cape Town’, ArtThrob, June–July 2013, http://www.artthrob.co.a/Revews/Athi_Mongezeleli_Joja__reviews_Kgoro_ya_go_Tswa_by_Dineo_Seshee_Bopape_at_Stevenson_inCape_Town.aspx, accessed 22 August 2022.
Sean O’Toole and Dineo Seshee Bobape, ‘Interview’, in My Joburg, exhibition catalogue, La Maison Rouge, Paris 2013.
Portia Malatjie, ‘Nang’umfazomnyama: Race and Technology in Dineo Seshee Bopape’s is i am sky’, Afterall, no.48, Autumn/Winter 2019, pp.4–11.
Elvira Dyangani Ose
September 2013
Revised by Valentine Umansky, Michael Raymond and Celia Delahunt
August 2022
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