BOGOSI SIMUNYE

SEKHUKHUNI SUMMIT
2010
JOHANNESBURG
KWAAL WORLD
2010

“MANY IN YOUR PRESENT REALITY PERCEIVE THEMSELVES

AS ACCIDENTAL AUTONOMOUS PHYSICAL BEINGS.
IN KWAAL WORLD IT IS KNOWN THAT THE PHYSICAL BODY
IS SIMPLY A HARDWARE INTERFACE SUIT DESIGNED TO
INTERACT WITHIN THE LAWS OF 3RD DIMENSIONAL REALITY.
IT IS ACTIVATED BY A SPIRIT IMPLANT.
SPIRIT IMPLANTS ARE HIGHER DIMENSIONAL INTERFACES
FOR SOUL BODIES TO EXPERIENCE THEMSELVES.
SOUL BODIES ARE SO BIG TO EXPERIENCE THEMSELVES IN A 3RD
DIMENSIONAL STATE THEY HAVE TO DIVIDE THEMSELVES INTO
MILLIONS AND SOMETIMES BILLIONS OF SPIRIT IMPLANTS.“
– Simunye Systems Orientation
 BOGOSI SEKHUKHUNI
SIMUNYE SUMMIT 2010
Previous pages:

Simunye Systems Antechamber

Installation view

Simunye Systems Orientation

2017, HD video
Duration 7 min 23 sec

Pages 16, 38, 62, 68:

Orisha Totems
2016, banners for Kampala Biennale

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 ONLINE/OFFLINE
AT BOGOSI SEKHUKHUNI’S
SIMUNYE SUMMIT 2010

KABELO MALATSIE

In this climate anyone can begin to build an

alternative present, reconfigure failed narratives,
decipher meaning from continual flux.
– DIS, 20161

Dear Rakgadi

Bogosi Sekhukhuni is a weird cross between Credo Mutwa, King

Sekhukhune, online popular culture, African and esoteric spirituality and
something from a future episode of Westworld. His exhibition Simunye
Summit 2010 concludes, begins and continues an investigation into
consciousness that was perhaps birthed on Mxit during the 1994 euphoria
or coming off the high of Mandela’s ‘rainbow nation’. Sekhukhuni’s work
is hard to read for those like me who find the aesthetic of the internet
unrecognisable, and here I speak of recognition in the sense that you
cannot see what you do not recognise – it does not and cannot register

21
until it’s knowable to you. Luckily for me, I met him in 2013 when he
was studying at the University of Johannesburg; we had a zigzagging
conversation and I almost missed my flight back to the colony. Then he
spoke of post-colonialism and black aspirational aesthetics. I recognised
the aesthetics (faux Italian baroque furniture and other markers of wealth
within the black community after 1994) and shared in his lament that the
white cube exhibition space somehow alienated most black people.
In subsequent long conversations, I learnt a great deal about the internet,
or rather its language. For us older folk it is merely a means to an end. We
use email, Facebook and other basic applications, and have smartphones
that we only use for calls and messaging – our engagement with these
technologies is very limited. We are clueless about the inner workings
of the internet. Sekhukhuni has been patiently teaching me about other
languages that I did not have access to. Lately it is African spirituality.
My lessons on the internet only clicked during a visit to the ninth Berlin
Biennale, curated by the uber-cool collective DIS, and where Sekhukhuni
participated as part of CUSS Group’s collective presentation. Here, artists
such as Trevor Paglen/Jacob Appelbaum and Alexandra Pirici made evident
the ways our interactions online are harvested for a variety of reasons, in
a clear infringement of our rights. It was very apparent that surveillance
in itself is a commodity prized by the neoliberal machine, something that
most internet users are unaware of. The shiny gloss on the democratising
of information, on infinite access to everything, became dull very quickly
as I remembered Sekhukhuni’s words about algorithms functioning as the
borders of cyberspace, that the internet is not a safe place. Cyberspace has
been revered for allowing you to recreate yourself by having an avatar and
other escapist fictions; this is all a distraction while something ominous
happens in the background.

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 There is a scene in the sci-fi TV series Westworld where a host (a
humanoid robot) becomes conscious of itself while online – actively
playing a role within a set narrative created by humans for their visitors’
enjoyment in a theme park. The host then struggles with its given narrative
and questions its own existence and potential for self-actualisation.
Another offline host wakes up (goes online) while on the repair table as
technicians run maintenance on its body. When returned to the theme
park, it is aware of the role it plays there. Without programmed amnesia,
the host is mindful that everything runs on a loop – that there is no free
will. Sekhukhuni woke up to the lack of free will during online interactions.
I, on the other hand, woke up to it while offline, viewing the ninth Berlin
Biennale, at a time when right-wing protests were taking place in the city.
I subsequently became hyperaware of my race and gender. The notion
of existing within a loop or a narrative that is not of one’s making is
something that the presenter played by Sekhukhuni in the Dream Diary
Season 2 videos is cognisant of, as he repeatedly revokes the contracts
that we unknowingly get involved in. Now where can we be free, Rakgadi?
Pirici and Paglen/Appelbaum make you aware of the algorithmic filtering
and constant surveillance that is happening while using the internet.
Sekhukhuni’s revocations perhaps offer a symbolic or psychic awakening
and counter to the systems we exist in. For now the gesture is consolation
enough during this post-apocalyptic time where there is very little that can
be done against the seemingly all-consuming neoliberal system.
Sekhukhuni’s exhibition narrative is built using a timeline that is not only
corrective nostalgia but futuristic as well. Here we see a past in the future of
a parallel present. This notion of different timelines happening concurrently
is further explored in the Dream Diary Season 2 videos. I have been thinking
about how when I greet someone it is mainly in the plural, le kae. If I am

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greeting you, Rakgadi, I must also acknowledge those who have been and
those who exist in a different dimension and know of the future. Through
trolling the internet I found out that the author of the Dream Diary Season
2 narratives is a ‘Galactic Historian’, Andrew Bartzis. I wondered if these
revocations had anything to do with the hopelessness of our looped
existence online and offline and our powerlessness to effect any change
– an apocalyptic tone that ran through the ninth Berlin Biennale.
We normally rely on our bodily experience when viewing exhibitions
in an art gallery. You walk back and forth looking at the works, and the
exhibition is judged by the objects’ ability to shift your perception. Other
traditional markers of a successful exhibition include the artist’s mastery of
the materials they are working with. Walking back and forth looking at the
surfaces of objects is not particularly rewarding at Simunye Summit 2010.
If there is no mastery to marvel at, how does one engage this exhibition?
Should it be judged for its offline presentation? The physical viewing of the
exhibition is still productive – the headboard installations, which Sekhukhuni
has been investigating in relation to black aspirational aesthetics, have
been painted in psychedelic colours reminiscent of a spaceship engaging its
warp drive. Viewing the exhibition feels like walking through an exposition/
showroom,2 seeing fragments of something that becomes whole elsewhere.
It is while I was sitting in front of my computer revisiting Sekhukhuni’s
exhibition that I got a better understanding of the show’s online and offline
presence. He has been investigating esoteric and African spirituality,
including Credo Mutwa’s intergalactic stories and the common narratives
of science-fiction films. There is an aesthetic link between science fiction,
esoteric spirituality and post-internet art in the form of psychedelic colours
and hippie aesthetics. In the pseudo-paralytic state of staring into the deep
voids of the internet, I became acquainted with Sekhukhuni’s quest for

24
 healing from past traumas, which is a central theme in his artistic practice.
Simunye Summit 2010 is a fictitious narrative that should not be judged
based on its tangible aspects in the exhibition space but rather on the
impact it has on our interactions both online and offline. Sekhukhuni not only
challenges our perception but requires us to think about our existence and
how it is affected by the technologies we use. At first glance it may seem as
though you need to learn internet speak; on the contrary, Rakgadi, you need
to remember how non-linear time and space works, remember the folding of
space in a dream. In this post-apocalyptic political landscape it may be time
to reimagine the spiritual dimension of our online and offline experiences.

Yours lovingly,
Kabelo

Kabelo Malatsie is a curator living in Johannesburg

1 DIS. 2016. The Present in Drag. Berlin: KW Institute of Contemporary Art. 55-56
2 Sekhukhuni speaks of treating the art gallery as an expo: ‘I see gallery spaces as purely
industry showcases – other industries, like aeronautics and cellphones, have expos to
show their shit as well. For me that’s all that it is.’ (See p63)

25
“TODAY I TRAVEL THE GREAT UNKNOWN, GRANT ME THE WISDOM TO BE HUMBLE.
GRANT ME THE WISDOM TO LOVE, EVEN WHEN LOVE IS NOT RETURNED.
GRANT ME THE KNOWLEDGE TO BALANCE MY WAY OF BEING.
SO I MAY HEAL MY FAMILY, MY TRIBE, MY NATION AND OUR MOTHER EARTH.”
– Dream Diary Season 2, Divine Masculinity Soul Contract Revocations

Soul Contract Revocations, Dream Diary Season 2: Priscilla

2017, headboard with digital videos (Dream Diary Season 2, Divine
Masculinity Soul Contract Revocations and Dream Diary Season 2,
Government Soul Contract Revocations)
80 x 220 x 105cm

26
27
Dream Diary Season 2,
Divine Masculinity Soul Contract Revocations
2017, HD digital video
Duration 2 min 43 sec

28
Dream Diary Season 2,
Government Soul Contract Revocations
2017, HD digital video
Duration 2 min 41 sec

29
 Soul Contract Revocations, Dream Diary Season 2: Joyce
2017, headboard with digital videos (Dream Diary Season 2,
Media Systems Soul Contract Revocations and Untitled)
125 x 222 x 105cm

30
31
Dream Diary Season 2,
Media Systems Soul Contract Revocations
2017
HD digital video
Duration 2 min 58 sec

32
“I REVOKE ALL SPIRITUAL CONTRACTS WITH EARTH BASED MEDIA
SYSTEMS USING DOMINATION AND CONTROL AS A MEANS OF ENERGY
HARVESTING, FEAR INSTIGATION OR REALITY MANIPULATION WITH
ENERGETIC PROPAGANDA TECHNOLOGIES.”
– Dream Diary Season 2, Media Systems Soul Contract Revocations

Untitled
2017
HD digital video
Duration 1 min 15 sec

33
“DOESN’T THIS FEEL LIKE DÉJA VU?
DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE?
YOU ARE NOT ALONE.”
– Dream Diary Season 2, Dream 7

Soul Contract Revocations, Dream Diary Season 2: Matilda

2017, headboard with digital videos (Dream Diary Season 2,
Dream 7; Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 6 and Untitled)
91 x 237 x 6.5cm

34
35
Sacred Geometry Building
2017
HD digital video
Duration 1 min 33 sec

36
Dream Diary Season 2,
Dream 7
2017
HD digital video
Duration 36 sec

37
Hollow Earth, Hollow Man
2017, sound, couch
125 x 170 x 170cm
Duration 9 min 52 sec

38
39
 WORKS
2016-2013
 Untitled
2016, reflective vests, vinyl, mounted on frame
102 x 126cm

42
43
 seFate Sa Bophelo
2016, digital print, volcanic rock
99 x 199.5cm

44
45
WOMB (what is black twitter? what is african twitter?)
Red, Orange, Yellow, Lilac, Pink
2016, felt lettering on fleece blankets
110 x 165cm each

46
47
Untitled (OIC Energy Bath and Sound Treatment) Orisha Totems
2016, mixed media installation, 2016 Dakar Biennale 2016, banners for Kampala Biennale

48
49
 Consciousness Engine 2: absentblackfatherbot
2014, dual-channel video installation
Duration 4 min 30 sec
Produced as part of 89+ residency at The Lab at the Google Cultural Institute, Paris

50
51
52
53
54
55
 KWAAL LYF
2014, neon
116 x 118.5cm

56
 Unfrozen: Rainbowcore
2014, installation including Dream Diary Season 1, 1-6, 2013, digital videos
Installation view, Unfrozen: Rainbowcore, Whatiftheworld, Cape Town

57
Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 1 Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 2
2013 2013
HD digital video HD digital video
Duration 1 min 26 sec Duration 57 sec

Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 4

2013
HD digital video
Duration 26 sec

58
Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 3
2013
HD digital video
Duration 2 min 20 sec

Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 5 Dream Diary Season 1, Dream 6

2013 2013
HD digital video HD digital video
Duration 32 sec Duration 53 sec

59
the ratchet of the earth
2013, 36 loaves of bread
26 x 66 x 145cm
Installation view, A Sculptural Premise,
Stevenson Cape Town

60
61
 Innocentia
2013, installation with live sculpture and video
Video duration 32 sec
In the night I remember, Stevenson Johannesburg

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63
 ‘I’M GENERATING CONSCIOUSNESS’
BOGOSI SEKHUKHUNI IN CONVERSATION WITH
PAMELLA DLUNGWANA
PD You said as a kid you read a lot. What do you
read now?
BS When I learnt how to read I literally thought I could
do magic because I thought reading was magic. This
was in kindergarten, and I just ran with it. Now I struggle
with reading fiction because I’m used to movies. When
I approach a narrative I’m used to that narrative being
able to exist in a certain amount of time. So I mostly read
newspapers. Then there’s the Susan Stone paper Of Virtual
Communities on the Internet to which I keep going back.
How did you arrive at the internet as a space?
Mxit was the first Facebook. Mxit doesn’t get the credit
it deserves, in terms of its social importance for my
generation. You could flirt online – especially for gay and
lesbian youth that was the place where you would go if you
were a teenager to get off.
65
Do you see the internet interacting outside of itself?
There’s supposed to be a conflict in spaces between IRL and
URL but I don’t see it as a clash. I just see it as an expansion
of an experience that could be online. I recently resolved
my issues with gallery spaces, or at least I’ve come to an
understanding of how they can work for me. I see gallery
spaces as purely industry showcases – other industries, like
aeronautics and cellphones, have expos to show their shit
as well. For me that’s all that it is. Once you start to attach
this aura of social significance it becomes dishonest. It’s just
another industry.
Speaking to a friend I was told, ‘Oh Bogosi comes from
a very pan-Africanist background.’ What does that mean,
a pan-Africanist childhood?
I grew up with a single mom and she’s an OG in her field.
She studied film and she’s one of the exiles that went to the
UK, where she did a lot of media stuff, studying while writing
music reviews for Drum, that kind of thing. When she came
back in the early 1990s they started an initiative training
black kids from Joburg and the rest of the continent to work
in TV and film. That project later turned into Newtown Film
and Television School, which was our life up until 2001 when
there was a big fire. Basically I grew up going to a film school
my whole childhood.
And you had no siblings, right?
No, and being an only child you just live in your head like a
motherfucker, it’s insane. I had a basketball that I attached
personalities to and I had teddy bears and I would christen
them with black names instead of names like Mike, which
were typically used for toys. I named my teddy bears Tsepo,
Tsepiso, Thabo.
My mom stressed the fact that I needed to identify
with black imaging. She also did a lot of travelling on the
continent when I was younger, and I was always surrounded
by people from other countries. We had really strong ties
with Ghana and we used to go every second year for the
student film festival and she used to buy me books about
Anansi the spider.
I guess one would consider your mom to be ‘woke’
these days.
Dude, eighth generation woke. Haile Gerima was a regular
visitor, he used to stay at our crib when he came to SA. I was
around all those conversations as a child, even that classic time
when he came in 2003, when they were premiering Sankofa.
Mutabaruka was around and I was a kid amidst all that stuff.
66
You were the kid under the table.
It’s that single parent thing: you’re just going to go
everywhere with your kid.
I seem to come across artists whose mothers are
pivotal characters; Mancoba, for instance, whose mother
impressed the value of language on him via poetry, and
here you are with a mom with the same kind of demands.
Yeah, my mother used to lock me up during the holidays,
and force me to write one poem each day. I used to hate it.
I literally thought that she hated me.
She wanted me to be an artist. Obviously I rejected the
idea. I was going to study fashion. Because fashion was
something I was not exposed to as a kid.
What about the people around you? When you describe
the set in which you grew up I immediately get a sense
of a particular aesthetic. Didn’t their sense of fashion
influence you?
I would look at my mom and think ‘that’s really cool’, but I still
had to deal with the social pressure of going to school and
have kids shit on you for not wearing labels. I wasn’t trying to
be in no African print nothing, no ‘loincloth’ nothing.
Your generation has somehow smashed the notion of
‘this is me and in Kente and I’m black and I’m in the
space’. You point out that there are other modes. In
Dream Diaries, it’s ‘here’s video, it’s a medium but I’m
going to use it for what I’m going to use it for, to achieve
this other thing’. How did you get there?
Dineo Bopape is a big influence on Dream Diaries. Her
videos are just like fuck; I mean her editing process is
something I had never seen before.
But there is still a great difference between the works
technically. Her videos are clean and they are crisp,
because as much as the edges fray, even when we go into
a distortion, all of it is beautifully rendered – even when
you go into snow mode, it’s virginal white, clean. Your
images are smudgy and they bleed. It’s like you went into
that clean lounge at your grandmother’s and just pulled
everything to the floor. It’s a statement, ‘You’re going to
see that I was here.’
For me clean, finished, factory level stuff – you can do that
with a machine and so for me that value is dead. I like the
noise. When I heard Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground
for the first time, I didn’t know music could be like that.
It’s as if these videos are constructed mainly out of
synthetic dirt, the ‘etcetera’ the internet and our South
African experience have to offer. Dream Diaries opens
one up to a host of emotions. There’s you laughing and
jeering, wanking and then ... Kentridge. I died.
Siyabangena! That episode is the wet dream in the series,
and I was really trying to build a cheap mythology around
some daddy shit, me finding William Kentridge as the dad
that I never knew about. ‘William, I am your son. Pay my
school fees.’
Which brings us to the absentblackfatherbot. The
characters were so universal, even though it began as a
67
transcript of an actual conversation. How did you come
to produce that work?
I was doing a residency and the original project wasn’t
working out because the French government has really
weird attitudes towards DNA testing.
I’m generating consciousness. If you take the notion that
consciousness is something that we get to through engaging
with what’s around you, then you can, in a poetic way, generate
consciousness between two semi-autonomous beings or
objects by having them interact with each other. I treat the
videos as simulations, of my entire relationship with that guy.
Consciousness Engine I is about the idea I had to try and
make a copy of myself using a script of my genome. I’m
trying to do a full sequence of my genome. I’d be printing out
my genome into a bucket of water and it would evaporate
as it comes out.
Don’t you run the risk of being mistaken for an item
belonging in the Afro-futurist laundry bag?
I’m trying to work this out myself, but the conversation is
very shallow and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we
actually don’t acknowledge the conversations or knowledge
our ancestors were having before ...
The colonial interruption?
Yeah. I’m trying to understand how people back then
understood reality, physical reality and their place in it. And
I think that’s where the answer is going to be. Afro-futurism
to me is nothing. In present times it is really a kind of
cultural imperialism.
I watched the three videos you made titled So Saith Dmitri Mendeleev. Because Maxwell is Christian his angle
the Lord? Who is that guy? is that it’s the glory of God, but for us we see him as in
tune with a metaphysical pluri-dimensional perspective on
That is the future! I’m really excited about what he’s doing, reality; we see him as communicating with an entity in the
for me it’s history. Maxwell is a guy from Zimbabwe, and fourth dimension or the fifth dimension, who may describe
he’s a self-taught engineer. themselves as God.
There are so many layers to this. Science increasingly
Or divinely taught, as he says. accepts that physical reality is not all there is, which is what
black people have known since forever – there are forces
He is self-taught, he’s been doing this since the late 1990s. outside of us that interact with our world.
He first built a radio broadcast transmitter and made illegal
broadcasts. His company went viral because they had
an open day where they invited school kids and media.
What he’s doing is actually revolutionary – he’s tapped
into free energy, which for a long time has been a topic
for conspiracy buffs, and then he comes with this divinely
attributed way of working as well. What is interesting to me
is his process, and how it differs from dominant scientific
ways of doing things.

God speaks to you? Bra, come on.

No, leave him, these things happen. What we are trying to

do is disrupt our cultures of knowledge systems that are
deeply rooted in how white people think or how Europeans
understand reality. This idea of experimentation through
data accumulation solely as a valid proof of an idea is
very European.
We were interested in seeing what an African perspective
on those scientific processes could be, and we wanted to
treat his visions as just as valid. There is a whole history
that is repressed within scientific circles of discoveries being
made through divine inspiration, people like Einstein and

68
Bogosi Sekhukhuni, born in Johannesburg in 1991, describes himself as a ‘lightworker and
creative director’. He is a founding member of the ‘tech-health artist group’ NTU and has
worked with the CUSS Group collective. His most recent collaborative project is a ‘visual
culture bank and research gang’ called Open Time Coven, which investigates ‘emergent
technologies and repressed African spiritual philosophies’.
Sekhukhuni has held three solo exhibitions: Simunye Systems 2010 at Stevenson
Johannesburg (2017); Restore the Feeling as part of a residency at the Bag Factory,
Johannesburg (2016); and Unfrozen: Rainbowcore at Whatiftheworld, Cape Town (2014).
In 2016 he took part in the Kampala and Dakar biennales, and the Berlin Biennale as part
of NTU and the CUSS Group. In 2015 he showed work on the 89+ Prospectif Cinéma
programme at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Film Will Always Be You: South African
Artists on Screen at Tate Modern, London; Co-Workers – Network as Artist at the Musée d’Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Filter Bubble at the LUMA Foundation’s Westbau in Zürich.
Before that he participated in a number of group shows in South Africa, including In the
night I remember (2013) and A Sculptural Premise (2014), both at Stevenson. With CUSS
Group, he was included in Private Spaces: Art after the Internet at the Museum of Modern
Art, Warsaw, in 2014. Sekhukhuni was awarded a Prix Net Art award by the New York-based
digital arts organisation Rhizome in 2017.
His ongoing research can be accessed at http://bogosisekhukhuni.tumblr.com/

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 CAPE TOWN
Buchanan Building
160 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock 7925
PO Box 616, Green Point 8051
T +27 (0)21 462 1500

JOHANNESBURG
62 Juta Street
Braamfontein 2001
Postnet Suite 281
Private Bag x9, Melville 2109
T +27 (0)11 403 1055

info@stevenson.info
www.stevenson.info

Catalogue 88
March 2017

© 2017 for work: the artist

© 2017 for texts: the authors

Front cover Dream Diary Season 2,

Government Soul Contract Revocations, 2017
Back cover Dream Diary Season 2, Dream 7, 2017
Inside covers Hollow Earth, Hollow Man, 2017, details

Design Gabrielle Guy

Photography Mario Todeschini, Anthea Pokroy
Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town