Simnikiwe Buhlungu: hygrosummons (iter.02)

Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s exhibition hygrosummons (iter.02) transforms the building of Kunstinstituut Melly into a porous, responsive site. Comprising installation, sculpture, drawing, and sound, Simnikiwe’s new commission unfolds as a sensing hygrometer that conspires with the conditions of the building—summoning water to reveal the ways knowledge, history, and ecology circulate and pool. Puddles are not treated as a minor detail but as a site of accumulation. As Simnikiwe puts it, “The show expands our day-to-day understanding of how water circulates through humidity, moisture, and puddles, by encouraging us to look again at their complexity, and what they might tell us about how knowledge is produced and accessed."

Spanning multiple floors—from basement to rooftop—the installation brings together water samples collected from puddles in Rotterdam, Italy, and South Africa. These are joined by sculptural instruments—zithers—tuned to humidity and materials that shift, leak, or settle over time. Sound, too, is shaped by the moisture in the air—absorbed and altered by the building’s atmosphere. Throughout the exhibition, the artist intervenes in and alongside the architecture: puddles echo the slant of the uneven roof; hand-sculpted clay vents—made using clay sampled from Rotterdam and subterranean puddles from Salse di Nirano, Italy—intervene within the building’s ventilation system; and improvised schematics drawn by the building’s former manager reappear in the form of specially designed merchandise. Simnikiwe, as she says, “thinks with the building,” treating its idiosyncrasies as openings for attunement. Unfolding during a moment of architectural transition at Kunstinstituut Melly, hygrosummons participates in sensing the conditions of the building ahead of the structural renovation of its roof.

Simnikiwe’s practice looks at how knowledge is produced and felt. Through installations that bring together sound, sculpture, and publishing, she traces inquiry or invisible systems—working with water, language, and time as open-ended forms of questioning. “We experience universal phenomena across disparate places and their conditions,” she reflects. “Things that happen in one place might also happen in another, but they look different, mean different, or are encountered differently. What can those shifts tell us?”

This project was co-commissioned with Chisenhale Gallery, London, who presented the first iteration of the exhibition in 2024. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, besides Puleng; dontsa-ring and roving preoccupations (2024), co-published with Chisenhale Gallery and Mousse Publishing and available for purchase in the ground-floor bookshop.