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A Wash in the Oceans
John Haberin New York City
María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Dineo Seshee Bopape
María Magdalena Campos-Pons opens her Brooklyn retrospective with her largest and most layered work yet, in a room to itself just outside. You may have come to expect a museum celebration of craft, culture, and shared memories, including the memories of black and South African women. And Campos-Pons delivers, or does she? You might find yourself facing the same question with Dineo Seshee Bopape at MoMA.
I had never so much as heard of Campos-Pons, but her installation felt instantly familiar. Ironing boards lean against the wall, bearing vintage photos of what must surely be her ancestors—or those of someone very much like her. Videos separate them, with the same size and shape apart from rounded tops, like church windows or altarpieces. Their images come and go, 
but a woman folding the wash easily rules them all. She, too, could be an ancestor and a model, but then the installation is, after all, Spoken Softly with Mama. A woman must speak softly but carry a big load and it may not go easy.
No Time for Heroes
The woman's irons and hand-held mirrors multiply in front of her, dozens of them, in white glass on the floor. From their shape and direction, they might be ships carrying her to freedom or, radiating outward at the fleet's center, a star. This could be a heroic saga indeed, except for one thing: it belongs to a series of work, "History of a People Who Were Not Heroes," from 1998. Museum-goers have become accustomed to a recovery of diversity as a perpetual celebration. Sometimes, though, everyday heroes have to give way to the sadness of the everyday, at the Brooklyn Museum.
I should have seen the other side of Campos-Pons from the start. Laundry could stand for a due appreciation of women's work—or horror at a woman's forced labor. Bare legs also appear on video, leaving in question to whom they belong. Hands holding flowers could just as well be tearing them apart. That fleet recalls the Spanish armadas accompanying the slave trade. As one last turn, the work looks joyful all the same.
Wall text can be resolutely upbeat, and so can the imagery. Its most common motifs are faces and flowers, often covered with or in the shape of eyes. While not often given to humor, the Afro-Cuban artist recasts an Alexander Calder mobile with glass butterfly eyes in red. She also speaks of her spiritual debt to Santería, a blend of African religion and Catholicism. Born in 1959, she left Cuba more than thirty years ago, for Boston and then Tennessee, with studio time in a converted factory in Italy. She has not left her past behind, and footprints in gold and on video record her recent Cuba walks.
Still, there are complications. A "sacred bath" starts in cocktail glasses before oozing onto skin (to the accompaniment of tinkling sounds from Neil Leonard). She wipes it up with leaves as best she can before they decay. The sheer density of what I took for a family album alludes to the packing of bodies on slave ships. Coarse and colorful threads are her Freedom Trap, and other photos show bird cages. Do not expect to learn why the caged bird sings.
Not that this is downbeat art. Titles speak of The Calling, Replenishing, I Am a Fountain, and Classic Creole. Paired photos show Campos-Pons beside her mother, connected by only a thread, but a colorful one. It may suggest an umbilical cord. The exhibition title itself points both ways. "Behold" demands attention, but leaves open a degree of wonder at what one sees.
Campos-Pons sticks to her motifs, in line with the show's abandonment of chronology but too much for its arrangement by theme, and images can fall well short of wonder. Still, this view of Caribbean art and diversity knows domesticity and pain. Red letters cross a bare chest as if seared into flesh: Identity Could Be a Tragedy. It might not hurt to claim less for high-minded ideals. Heroes have a way of turning out to be arrogant males anyway.
Look alive
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 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." 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.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons ran at the Brooklyn Museum through January 14, 2024. Dineo Seshee Bopape ran at The Museum of Modern Art through October 9, 2023, "Life Cycles" through July 7, 2024.