Emerging from, speculating with, and working alongside the words and figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, the curatorial project Delay and Encounter and/or Other Proximate Unknowns muses on a poetics of the imminent unknown a Black unknown.
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Installation art, that occasionally perplexing accumulation of things, whether sculpted or found or otherwise, doesn’t immediately invite comparison with the array of marks an artist makes on a canvas or a piece of paper – but perhaps it could. ‘A shimmering thing at the edge of analysis’: so the art historian James Elkins, in an essay of 1995, described one possible function of the mark. ‘One instant it will seem to be solid and homogenous, and then it will resolve into parts.’ A similar description might be applied to the Delphic installations of Dineo Seshee Bopape, which combine formal elements – drawing, sculpture, video – with commonplace materials like fabric, oil, feathers, herbs, bricks, mirrors, linoleum, houseplants, gold leaf and mud. Confounding as they may first appear, upon close attention the arrangements of Bopape’s installations, which have appeared in cities across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reveal an intuitive logic.