Simnikiwe Buhlungu (b. 1995) is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Recent engagements include Collective Intimacies - Notes to Self: Intimate 1, mural project,The Showroom, London, UK, 2019 and Small World Real World, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020-2021). She obtained her BAFA degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2017) and is currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2020 - 2022).
Interested in knowledge production, how it is produced - and by whom - it’s dissemination and it’s nuances as a commonplace ecology, she uses her practice to wrestle between these questions and their inexhaustible potential answers.
Lately, she enjoys listening to gospel music and has been thinking about apiaries.
Images: Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Sound Session with The Vinyl Factory Performance Documentation, 2019. Courtesy of The Showroom and Prada.
This programme took place within Theaster Gates's installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aimed to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.
Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosted interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.
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