Simnikiwe Buhlungu is an artist from Johannesburg who is currently living and working in Amsterdam. Interested in knowledge production(s) – how it is produced, by whom, and how it is disseminated – Buhlungu locates socio-historical and everyday phenomena by navigating these questions and their inexhaustible potential answers. Through a research-based practice, she works through sound, text, installation, and publishing to map points of cognisance which situate various layers of awareness as reverberated ecologies.
In recent projects, she has delved into thinking about how to know if something that is not visible is present with us. This reflection comes from an exploration in (im)material research, developed alongside a microbiologist and chemist, to understand the ways in which scientific apparati can become methodologies for sensing that which is not ocular but exists in time, across geo-historical narratives and genealogies. Buhlungu was a resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, from 2020-2022 and graduated with a BA (Fine Arts) at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017.
For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, she presents Ventilated Pipe Progenies in Another Elsewhere (2025), a site-specifically adapted work from her 2024 project long time lung time continuuum!!! (a conver-something) at Kunst im Tunnel (KIT), Düsseldorf. This iteration reveals a kinship unit of ventilation pipes, extending from the ceiling of the Pavilion and descending beneath it, connecting to the building’s circulatory mechanisms of ventilation that enable for various forms of gathering, sensing, and listening to take place within its architecture. Further, these metal pipes point to the consciousness and functioning of a physical structure and their ability to speak, question, propose or exist within slippages. Here, the pipes not only inhale and exhale air as structural lungwork but spatially redirect air in loops of whistling, huffing, puffing, and tonal gestures of sound. Each pipe is in conversation with their sibling, simultaneously exchanging air circulated by visitors; in totality, syncopated in breath.
Acknowledgements: Salmo Albatal, Stephan Kuderna (Metal Workshop, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten), Stefano Rattini (Organista Trentino), Leonardo Ciarleglio, Barbara Cappello, and Maurizio Zelada.