Dineo Seshee Bopape. sa ____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke ___).

A room full of earth

In late 2016, Art in General, a nonprofit art space in Dumbo, Brooklyn, opened Dineo Seshee Bopape's first solo exhibition in the United States. The work was made through the organisation's New Commissions program and stayed on view until mid January 2017.

What met visitors first was smell. Freshly burnt sage, the smoke used to clear a room before a ceremony. Then earth, warm and round, rising from large blocks of compacted soil placed around the gallery. They were squared off, like plots of field cut out of the ground and carried indoors.

On the surface of the soil lay many small things. Rose petals in several colours. A candle. Bundles of sage. Lumps of clay still holding the prints of the artist's hands. Wool, charcoal, feathers, ash. Cowrie shells, pebbles, bits of gold. Small white mounds of powder. A little gold rabbit. Charred wood chips mixed into the earth.

The artist and the land

Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in 1981 in Polokwane, South Africa, and lives and works in Johannesburg. She has worked with video, sound, found objects and raw materials. In the years around this show, soil became her main material.

The title is in Sepedi, one of South Africa's languages. A close translation: that which is of ___ is dust, (that which is of dust is ___). The blanks are left open. Visitors can fill them in, or leave them empty.

According to Art in General, the commission grew partly out of Bopape's presentation at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, held the same year. She looks at land from several sides at once: gender, memory, history, the politics of place, and the question of what matter itself is.

In South Africa, land has never been a neutral subject. Who owns it, who was driven off it, who works someone else's ground. Bopape does not write those sentences on the wall. She puts the soil in the room and lets it speak.

Games in the soil

Up close, the blocks are not flat. They carry dents and small holes filled with shells, stones and gold. The arrangement recalls Morabaraba and Diketo, two games played across southern Africa. Morabaraba is played with pieces on a grid, often scratched straight into the ground. Diketo is a game of tossing and catching small stones.

A game is one way people use earth every day: not to farm it, not to own it, only to be together on it. By setting games into blocks of soil that have been cut away, Bopape shows land as more than a resource. It was once a place of ritual, of shared life, of children.

Writing for Hyperallergic, the critic Seph Rodney said the room made him think of ritual objects left behind, and of the vitality of soil running down under human care. The sage has burned. The flowers have wilted. The earth is drying into dust.

What remains is dust

Most sculpture is made to last. Stone, bronze, treated wood. Bopape's work runs the other way. It begins damp and full of smell, then slowly dries. Someone who visited in the first week and someone who came in the last did not smell the same room.

The smell here is not an added effect. It is evidence that the material is still alive. As it fades, the visitor knows the soil is losing water and the ritual is receding.

The title said so from the start. Whatever belongs to earth becomes dust. And dust, in turn, belongs to something we have not yet named. Bopape leaves that space blank.

Earth and smell meet in other works too, such as the tears, earth and chrysanthemums of Karola Braga. In Bopape's room the soil is not made to smell good. It is simply left alone until it turns to dust.