Transcript

102 The Art Happens Here: Bogosi Sekhukuni

Hello, my name is Bogosi Sekhukuni. I’m an artist originally from South Africa.

The video is an installation that I consider to be a poetic machine that generates consciousness. Interested in the idea of, the phenomenon of consciousness as something that can be attributed to inanimate things or groups of data. So essentially it’s a transcript or a simulation of a six year conversation that I was having with my father, who I met on Facebook, and basically what I consider to be the entirety of our relationship. And so I thought it would be interesting to reenact that and for that reenaction to be an to be act of consciousness generation.

For me it was like therapy a lot, it was sort of killing several birds with one stone. It’s like an act of self-healing and also just to be able to use myself as a case study for bigger ideas. Something I don’t think I’ve spoken about before is that the aspect of the universal attraction to this situation and how just so many people who don’t look like me can relate to it. It’s been something that was super powerful for me to experience, just like people from halfway across the world relating to and finding healing from the work.

A lot of my work looks at the internet and it’s relation to black culture, black society. And I guess in turn, black pain. There’s a lot within that context that is quite difficult to navigate through. Quite difficult and quite tricky. In different video works of mine, I always actively think of the fact that these videos are looped and this content is being repeated over and over again, or that energy is being generated over and over again. And with this particular work because it’s such a painful thing, for that pain to be circulated and repeated over and over again… there’s something about that that I’m trying to navigate and understand.