hygrosummons (iter.01)

Chisenhale Gallery

5 September - 3 November

hygrosummons (iter.01) marks the first UK solo exhibition by South African, Amsterdam-based artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu. Comprising installation, sculpture, and sound, Buhlungu’s new commission summons water to reveal the ways knowledge, history, and ecology circulate and pool.

Conspiring with the conditions of the gallery and materials that hold and release water – pine, clay, paper, and bamboo – Buhlungu transforms Chisenhale Gallery into a porous and changeable site. Departing from the hygrometer, a scientific instrument used to measure humidity, the commission turns away from accuracy and control, and towards convening, sensing, and misbehaving with water. 

Warped wooden doors mark the thresholds between inside and outside, public and private. Submerged in the neighbouring Hertford Union Canal prior to their installation, they are repurposed as rafts for birdlife, homes for pondweed, and to gather water. No longer functioning as intended, the swollen pine asks us: how can structures or systems transgress their function?

A series of buckets contain puddle samples collected from four geographical sites – the Tswaing Crater in Soshanguve, the backyard maize garden of Buhlungu’s mother, the Salse di Nirano Nature Reserve in Fiorano Modenese, and puddles outside of Chisenhale Gallery. Leaking, irrigating, and vibrating, they are connected by the hydrological cycle, where a puddle in Johannesburg might travel across the same atmospheric current as another in East London. As the samples reverberate and evaporate across borders, contamination and kinship become indistinguishable from one another.

Two zithers – whose forms echo Mvets, instruments originating in West and Central Africa – work through an original score. As humidity levels fluctuate, their strings tighten and loosen, creating unstable tonal shifts that are sampled, through playback, to mark the puddle’s arrival and departure throughout the space.

Brick air vents, made with clay from the mud puddles of Salse di Nirano, are inserted into the walls, releasing humidity into the publicly inaccessible spaces of the building. Drawings of the water cycle made on paper, a material that often necessitates controlled humidity, disobediently curl away from damp walls, revealing otherwise concealed messages.

hygrosummons (iter.01) intercepts existing infrastructures and ecological cycles as water puddles, drips, and evaporates. In various states of visibility and invisibility, each pooling invites us to question the ways knowledge is produced, the conditions that mediate our access to it, and if we ever really know what we think we know.