Simnikiwe Buhlungu

Simnikiwe Buhlungu (b.1995) is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She obtained her BA (Fine Art) degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2017. 

Recent projects include the Actually, The Dead Are Not Dead, Bergen Assembly, Bergen, Norway (2019) and the Collective Intimacies mural project, The Showroom, London, UK (2019). She has participated in international residencies, namely the WIELS residency programme in Brussels, Belgium (2018), the Future Assembly residency between London and Cambridge (UK) and Lagos [upcoming 2020] and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands [upcoming 2020].

Lately, she enjoys listening to gospel music and has been reading about apiaries.

Through print and text based mediums and often taking installation based forms, Buhlungu’s interest in navigating personal and socio-historical narratives presents itself as a complex web of [re]imagined engagements which are surrounding, but not exclusive to, experiences embedded within the complexity of knowledge production(s) - which are [un]written, [un]spoken, [un]heard, made [in]visible. Through this, her practice begins to develop into a conversation of posing questions and attempting to provide answers to these ideas. Her work has existed in a variety of forms - text, print, video, sonic negotiations, installation though a number of exhibitions and spaces. Buhlungu also engages with printed material and publications, their production and dissemination - in conversation with her practice.

Ideas that are offshooting from these negotiations depart from knowledge production as a site of incongruencies, and how these moments call for the urgency to self-historicise and ultimately, self-determine. This is further manifested in her use of visual materials and language, in the aforementioned media, to activate research as a creative practice and how this creative models can be used to initiate visual conversations of these moments of self-historicising and self-determination.