_{MoMA New York, 2023}

Dineo Seshee Bopape (b. 1981, Polokwane, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Bopape spent her youth in Limpopo in varying social situations. At 12, she began to follow a hunger for an elsewhere, beginning with Durban where she spent some years and studied painting and sculpture at Durban Institute of Technology. She is a 2007 graduate of De Ateliers in Amsterdam and in 2010 completed an MFA at Columbia University, New York. She was a co-winner of the Artes Mundi 9 prize in 2021, the main prize winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 by PinchukArtCentre, the recipient of a 2010 Columbia University Toby Fund Award, and the winner of 2008 MTN New Contemporaries Award.

She has shown her work internationally in numerous solo exhibitions – most recently at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Ocean Space, Venice and Secession, Vienna (2022); Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2021); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Darling Foundry, Montreal (2017); Art in General, New York, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Hordeland Kunst Sentrum, Bergen, and Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2015); as well as group shows including the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection (2023); the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022); Prospect New Orleans (2021); Busan Biennale (2020); Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2018); Sharjah Biennale (2017); Marrakech Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo, Montreal Biennale, and SeMA – Media City Seoul (2016); and Biennale de Lyon, (2013). She co-represented South-Africa at the Venice Biennial in 2019.

Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in the year of the golden rooster, 1981(1974 in the Ethiopian calendar), on a Sunday. If she were Ghanaian, her name would be akosua/akos for short. During the same year of her birth, there were perhaps 22 recorded Atlantic Ocean hurricanes and 4 Indian Ocean cyclones close to Mozambique. The Brixton riots took place; the song “endless love” is popular on the airwaves; Umkhonto We Sizwe performs numerous underground assaults against the apartheid state. the Boeing 767 makes its first air flight, Zaire is the premier producer of the world’s cobalt, Winnie Mandela’s banishment orders are renewed for another 5 years; In Chile, the Water Code is established, separating water ownership from land ownership; two people were injured when a bomb exploded in a Durban shopping center; Bobby Sands dies; There was an earthquake that killed maybe 50 people in China; an International NGO Conference on Indigenous Populations and the Land is held in Geneva, The name “internet” is mentioned for the first time; there is a coup d’etat in Ghana; princess Diana of Britain marries Charles; Bob Marley dies; an annular solar eclipse is visible in the Pacific Ocean. apartheid SA invades Angola; AIDS is identified/ created/named; Salman Rushdie releases his book “Midnight’s Children” ; Greece is struck by three earthquakes over a period of 11 days; the Slave trade is officially abolished in Mauritania; the remains of the Titanic are found; Muhammad Ali retires; USA and Japan are in the leading position in the seabed-mining industry, the 15th IVF baby is born, Thomas Sankara rides a bike to his first cabinet meeting;  Machu Picchu is declared a heritage site; a series of apparitions of The VirginMary commence to a group of school girls in Rwanda, also similarly, in Yugoslavia. New Zealand recognized 16 rivers and lakes as “Outstanding” and protected them in perpetuity. her paternal grandmother dies affected by dementia; MTV is launched; It is said that right whales born in that year, are taller than right whales born since. Other concurrent events of the year of her birth, and of her lifetime, are perhaps too many to fully know; Some things continued, some transformed, some shifted, others ended(?) some began… The world’s human population was then apparently at around 4.529 billion... today she (Bopape) is one amongst 7 billion - occupying multiple adjectives.