Slide installation with three projectors, 240 hand-painted slides, bricks
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Engraved directly onto slides, various abstracted images of water, rivers, and oceans are rhythmically projected onto the wall of the space of Hangar Bicocca, where the work was first shown in 2022, by three carousels. The images overlap and intersect, creating a poetic visual montage. The three projectors rest on some early 20th-century bricks belonging to the structure of the building, thus creating a physical connection between the installation and the context in which it is displayed. The play on words on which the work’s title is based—in the Sesotho language more means “tree” and moreana “medicine”—alludes to the healing properties of nature, a recurring concept in Bopape’s oeuvre. The images on the slides were produced primarily in Richmond, Virginia. Using clay from Senegal, Ghana, Cape Town, The Mississippi, and Richmond, a few of many ports related to the transatlantic slave trade. –HangarBicocca