Artist, Bogosi Sekhukhuni’s, new video and sound installation reflects our unique dualistic reality created by cyberspace and the dreamworld, writes Layla Leiman.
Bogosi Sekhukhuni is a young Johannesburg-based artist who describes himself as “a product of the rainbow nation”. His work engages this notion and all the permutations of personal and national identity associated with it.
Another key component of Sekhukhuni’s work is the Web 2.0, which is a defining aspect of his generation.
The Web 2.0 is characterised by interactivity, allowing “users to collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community” (Wikipedia). This term was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, who described the Web 2.0 as a “transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens”. This was the birth of blogging and the fundamental shift from static to constantly evolving user-generated content. Sekhukhuni grew up in this virtual world of Mxit, Myspace, Facebook and Tumblr in which identity is fluid, constantly changing and being reshaped.
“I feel like post-1976, Mxit was the most important liberation force for South African urban kids,” he says. “We really explored our curiosities about sexuality, race and love.”
Sekhukhuni calls the internet telepathy, and explores the conceptual parameters of this in his art, particularly in relation to notions of personal and national identity formation, negotiation and fantasy.
Dreaming up reality
Earlier in 2014 Sekhukhuni worked on a drawing project to teleport and upload himself on to the internet using his DNA. The project was, in fact, a speculative conversation about what could come to represent one’s self and how this might affect who we understand ourselves to be. Cyberspace challenges the perimeters of identity and provides a space for new identities to be explored and created.
“All over the world kids are talking to each other and recognising affinities and celebrating that. It’s an amazing time for history and we’re going to create special things,” Sekhukhuni says.
In his work, he references internet aesthetics directly, where the real and the constructed become interchangeable.
WHAT & WHERE: Unfrozen: Rainbowcore is on at Whatiftheworld Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town, until January 24, 2015.
This article is adapted from an interview with the artist that appeared first on the creative showcase site Between 10and5.
For full article and video clips see Mail & Guardian
