Kala

Opening at Southern Guild Cape Town on 18 September 2026, Kala marks South African artist Simphiwe Buthelezi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Buthelezi’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in material exploration, cultural continuity, and spiritual enquiry, drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems as frameworks through which to consider contemporary existence. Working predominantly with traditional Zulu materials such as ‘icansi’ (hand-woven reed mats), ‘tankrali’ (Zulu seed beads) and glass beads, Buthelezi engages in the existential undertaking of ‘ukubuyela emasisweni’ or “returning to the source,” reimagining intergenerational materials as carriers of memory, knowledge, and spiritual inheritance.

In Kala, Buthelezi extends this enquiry into the realm of measurement, asking how we might take account of ourselves and the world at a cultural moment of uncertainty. The isiZulu imperative that is the title translates to “weigh it” or “measure it,” invoking both the logic of calculation and the limits of it. In a pervasive societal milieu where value is increasingly determined by metrics, productivity, and modes of extraction, Buthelezi attempts to measure what refuses calculation: hope, memory, collective dignity, spiritual inheritance, and the distance between who we are and who we might yet become. What forms of knowledge remain, she asks, when conventional systems of measurement no longer suffice?

Across the exhibition, spheres, topographies, concentric circles, and fragmented landscapes manifest as recurring forms. The works recall celestial maps, geological formations, and ancient tools of navigation, occupying a material and conceptual space between the terrestrial and the esoteric. These forms become tools with which Buthelezi attempts to locate the self within a world that feels increasingly unstable: to take measure of how far we have strayed, what has been lost, and what might still be recovered. Rather than describing the world, the works propose another way of reading it, one where intuition and calculation, matter and memory, the mundane and the metaphysical coexist.

Through repetition and methodical labour, she treats materials as carriers of knowledge: repositories of information that can be accessed, exchanged, and transformed through making. Glass beads, natural fibres, clay, and found earth matter are layered into densely worked surfaces that record time as much as form. The work unfolds intuitively. Rather than imposing meaning onto the materials, Buthelezi allows it to emerge through sustained engagement with them.

This sustained engagement with material becomes a form of measurement in itself. Every reiterated gesture, woven strand, and positioned bead records duration, attention, and embodied labour, transmuting time itself into a visceral presence. In Kala, calculation becomes less about arriving at certainty than about cultivating a heightened awareness of the relationships that bind body to landscape, the individual to the collective, and the present to ancestral, multi-directional time. Making becomes a mode of enquiry through which systems of knowledge are not illustrated, but both preserved and produced.

Source: Southern Guilds website