Dineo Seshee Bopape is back from a two year stint in New York where she completed her MFA in new media at Columbia and has set up her installation ‘The eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye’ at the Michael Stevenson. It opened last Thursday.
What IS visible to the naked eye is a dense assemblage of rotating mirrors, lino-like wallpaper, lace curtains and flowers, flowers in vases, videos and photographs … nature has been subjected to the Bopape sense of exuberance and colour and brought inside. At the same time, there is also a disquieting sense, as In the red roses in the first scene of the classic David Lynch movie, Blue Velvet, that all is not as it seems ….
Dineo Seshee BopapeAcross the street at Blank Projects, Swiss artist Kerim Seiler has done what might seem to be the opposite, though working from a very different point of view. Carrying with them brightly coloured neon tubes and wooden stakes, Seiler and his collaborator Gregor Metzger moved out of the gallery, making their ‘Nomadic Structures’ sculptures in places from urban to deep in the wilds, introducing the fluorescent colours of the city into nature.
Kerim SeilerThe week finished with an invitation to high tea at the Mount Nelson. Could anything be more colonial sounding than that? Finger sized cucumber and egg mayonnaise sandwiches, little choux pastry tubes filled with smoked salmon, warm scones with apricot jam and clotted cream, and a rich Black Forest cake. Yum. My host was Steven Dubin, in town to promote his book, ‘Mounting Queen Vicforia: Museum transformation in a democratic South Africa, and after tea we listened to Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka.
Wole SoyinkaSaid Soyinka, in a response to a question about how young writers should be addressing social issues like poverty: ‘Please don’t freeze out the age-old existential concerns of literature in favour of immediate concerns like AIDS and child soldiers’.
A response which applies equally to the visual arts.
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