Dineo Seshee Bopape

is i am sky shows the artist’s face merging with the landscape that surrounds her. Filmed near San Franciso in 2011 and shot at a low angle, the work presents viewers with a restricted framing of Bopape’s face and the blue expanse above her. Over the course of the video, her features merge with spillages of colour, cosmos and blackness, blurring the internal and external boundaries of her identity.

The uncapitalised title relates to jazz composer Sun Ra’s (1934–1993) poem The Endless Realm, written in 1972. It begins:

Bopape’s work echoes Sun Ra’s celebration of cosmic Kemetism (a modern revival of ancient Nubian spiritual practices) as a frontier and launchpad for Black liberation. As the work progresses, the frame of the artist’s face becomes an expanding gateway into the vastness of the universe. When describing the video, Bopape has said: “I was trying to find a way of marrying the sky,” to merge with the “space that nothing occupies”.

During the time is i am sky was filmed, the activist Julius Malema was put on trial in Bopape’s home country of South Africa. He was indicted for hate speech after singing a politically contentious lyric from an anti-apartheid song. In response to this, Bopape can be heard singing Hamba Kahle Mkhonto (Goodbye Spear of the Nation), a song often chanted at the funerals of uMkhonto we Sizwe (anti-apartheid soldiers). The soothing quality of her voice contradicts the abrasiveness of the wind hitting her microphone, hinting at the resistance faced by those who have fought for liberation. These sounds are in turn layered with crashing waves and rhythmic drums – before giving way to interstellar ambience. In this way, is i am sky addresses historical and political constraints in the face of cosmic, while employing distorted sound and vision as forces of rapture and selfhood.