Partnership with the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University

About

Ile aye, moya, là, ndokh…harmonic conversions…mm is a solo exhibition by Dineo Seshee Bopape at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA). The show’s title calls to the elements: earth, wind, fire, and water…summoned in various languages from West and Southern Africa, and features new works spanning video, sculpture, installation, and animation.

Images, objects, and sounds made from soil and water resonate throughout this gallery. They point to cities, ports, and waterways that played important roles in the enslavement of people. By transforming soil samples from Virginia, Louisiana, Senegal, Ghana, and South Africa into material for sculpture and video, Bopape highlights the connectedness of the disparate places—historically and materially. She forges harmonic conversations with ancestral pasts, presences, and futures.

Each of the transatlantic sites Bopape explored for this exhibition expose crimes of history. The plantations, ports, and trading posts where human life was sold and consumed are still evident in our built environments today. These places carry a living memory—in their visible construction, in the wealth created by forced labor, and in festering social wounds that are often masked.

Yet, Bopape goes beyond the narrative of enslavement to explore the many ways people escaped to find freedom through running, through spirituality, through community, and through creativity.

menokin’s role

As part of the exhibition, the ICA and Bopape partnered with Menokin. Descendants of enslaved laborers at Menokin created small sculptures from clay sourced from the property, which Bopape arranged into a larger installation at the ICA.