MPOPI takes its name from the Setswana word for “doll,” a word that, within queer and transfeminine communities, holds tenderness, recognition, and survival. Here, that language is placed in tension with a history in which bodies have been named, shaped, and made available through systems of use. 

At its centre is a fictional figure who moves through a world that defines them before they are able to define themselves. Their body becomes something to be seen, handled, and understood through others, positioned within structures that determine value through visibility, desirability and control. They learn how to exist within this gaze. They learn usefulness. They learn silence. They learn how to remain. 

Across time, Black femme and transfeminine lives have existed within this contradiction: to be visible yet unrecognised, desired yet denied personhood, affirmed in intimacy yet erased in history. MPOPI holds this tension in the present, where the language of care and the conditions of harm coexist. 

Within this, a shift begins. The figure encounters their own body beyond what has been imposed upon it. What was once performed begins to loosen. What was once offered begins to withdraw. A quiet refusal emerges, but as a steady reorientation. 

What follows is not a return to innocence or purity, but an insistence on presence. The body carries what it has lived through, yet no longer exists solely within those terms. It resists being fixed, named, or consumed, even as it remains in full view. 

MPOPI does not attempt to resolve or contain the lives it echoes. It allows them to remain as feeling, as memory, as pressure. What remains is a body that cannot be easily read, but insists, softly and firmly in existing on its own terms.

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About the Artists