Lerato Shadi, Mabogo Dinku, 2019 [6:00 min.]

“In the video Mabogo Dinku, Shadi’s hand makes enigmatic gestures and she sings a folk
verse in Setswana. But she provides no subtitles or guidance on what the words and gestures
mean because she is narrating the un-narratable, the history of her people, marginalized
during apartheid South Africa. The history she was taught at school is the history of the
colonizer, which she rejects, so what history can she tell? Furthermore, the translation of the
language into English or other dominant western language would pay homage to western
languages as the universal one, continuing the boxing in of others’ mother tongues into the
languages of the other”. Winnie Sze

Lerato Shadi (* Mahikeng, lives and works in Berlin) studied visual art at the University of Johannesburg and earned a M.A. (Spatial Strategies) from Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin in 2018. She received the Alumni Dignitas Award from the University of Johannesburg in 2018 and in the same year Shadi was a fellow of the Villa Romana-Prize in Florence, Italy. Her works have been shown internationally in numerous solo and group exhibition, i. a. at the Palais de la Porte Dorée and in the Musée d’art moderne both in Paris (2021); in solo shows at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin and at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2020); during the 14th Curitiba Biennial in Brasil and at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019); Kunsthal Amersfoort in Holland, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town (2018); during the public program of The Parliament of Bodies at documenta 14 in Kassel (2017). Her video work Mabogo Dinku was part of the Artists’ Film International programme 2020, organized by Whitechapel Gallery London, and presented in art institutions around the globe. In March 2022 her monograph was published with Archive Books, Berlin.