“Boemo Diale’s new body work borrows from and responds to the aesthetics and the overarching imagination of Setswana and other indigenous cosmologies. Using symbols which are common to these universes, Diale reflects on the idea of finding one's place in the world through a connection to both culture and the cosmos. 

The title of her show, Tswala Gate, directly translates to “Close The Gate”. It is both an instruction and a protective act, so that she is able to create a sense of safety and locate her place in the world.

The work also serves as a metaphor. It suggests a desire to look forward and inward, without fear, while also reflecting the relationship between Tswana cosmologies and Diale’s inner world of personal reflection. 

Two world systems coexist — the world within and the world outside —and align  with Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s ideas expressed  in Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement, as “a comprehension of home and community cultures of Setswana as dynamics of modernity, not its antithesis.” 

Tswana cosmology is a geocentric view of the universe made up of the stars, the moon, and the sky; with Earth at the centre. That Earth is interpreted as somewhat flat, expressed in the one-dimensional planes of Diale’s compositions. Handed down orally, differing from person to person and tribe to tribe, Diale uses this tradition to speak to new ideas and build a lexicon of her own self-made identifications of the world around her.

Bridging these coterminal worlds, she sets her figures in vibrant interior settings with reimagined depths of fields and planes, Diale creates a ‘safe space’ in which her characters live to rest away from the world. Placed at the centre of her cosmos, the characters, which are versions of selves, mothers, aunts and sisters, each create their own realities with symbols and stories inspired by Tswana cosmological practices. 

Looking forward with the help of tools of divination, including the vessel and articulated borders she uses as devices, she temporarily closeslosing the gate between pastand future, borrowing from genetic memory to create new visual language within the protected confines.

*Keorapetse Kgositsile & The Black Arts Movement by Uhuru Portia Phalafala