Dineo Seshee Bopape invites one into her privileged circle. One can feel it the moment one crosses a circle of coarse white stones to find a seat. One can feel it in their gleam of white in near darkness. One can feel it, too, in the greater comfort and scale of her three-channel video, Lerato Laka, at the Museum of Modern Art through October 9.
The image of ocean waters would be absorbing enough all by itself, even without the gentle drumming and the artist’s voice. Lerato laka le a phela le a phela le a phela, she intones. “My love is alive, is alive, is alive.” 
That welcome may come as a surprise: just who has privileged you? She sings in a language unlikely to be yours, from her homeland in South Africa. The tongue itself struggles to hang on in Cape Town, where everyday life and official business have long been conducted in Afrikaans and then English. Here it speaks of a love that must remain enigmatic in any language. One can only guess, but the limestone and black soil that carpet the installation must be native to the region as well.
What she insists on loving is its history, and that may not be yours either. Who asked me as a white male American to claim for himself the torments of slavery and the Middle Passage—or the freer movements to and from Africa in the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora today? Bopape, though, is an optimistic soul, and hers is an ever-expanding circle. She likes to think of ongoing movements of the ocean. MoMA calls its show of a gift of Latin American art “Chosen Memories,” which already suggests what she hopes to share with anyone who enters. Still, chosen memories are, of necessity, more selective.
She cannot bring herself to dwell on anger and agony. As Bopape worked, she says, she kept thinking of a slave known only as Peter, who escaped to freedom. Wall text opens with a hopeful question as well: what does the ocean remember? Could it remember schools of fish repeating their passage year after year? I cannot swear what even they remember from day to day.
Still, the oceans offer a welcome. While the three channels and eight-channel sound suggest a circle, too, the video is for contemplating, not immersion. Brown clouds rise and disperse, and pale blue shoots through a deeper green. I may not understand its motions, but I can appreciate them. Droplets gleam on the water, perhaps because she has dispersed fruit and “libations” on its surface, and what may look like sharks are her hands. Fish may not feed on them, but she is always sharing.
Bopape has, all too briefly, the museum’s free lobby gallery and project space, across from “Life Cycles” through next July 7. It, too, goes heavy on the optimism, with “today’s materials” as a response to pollution and climate change. Strategies include recycling and 3D printing, mostly for clothing, while smart phones can sense their contribution to heat and carbon emissions. Now if only electronic waste were not itself a problem, and if only the world needed only fabric. If only, too, the designs and materials were more memorable. Maybe they need a step back, into history and the oceans.
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