From her earliest works to the present,
Kavula’s art has existed between the intersections of painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture, pushing the limitations of each. Initially creating the punched circular discs from canvas, Kavula has moved to using traditional shweshwe cloth, invoking cultural, ancestral, archival and historical connotations specific to her work. In Kavula’s sewedi sewedi (Sewedi being her mother’s maiden name), she paid homage to her elders and ancestors by naming works after late loved ones. Using her mother’s red shweshwe dress (a family heirloom) as inspiration, Kavula’s work can thus be read through the lens of memory – both collective and individual. Through her work the artist “reimagines everyday materials”¹, an idea noted by writer Nikita Keogotsitse. Kavula’s work can therefore be likened to rhopography – a painting genre in which everyday objects used by people are brought before our eyes or put on display in a way that makes us think about them anew and makes us contemplate human presence and absence.
Amogelang Maledu writes in about the artist:
“The process of Kavula’s body of work requires a lot of math. She achieves the precision of her artworks with the help of an A1 green cutting mat that has a guiding grid of measurements. Even though the work is labour intensive, “as a process chick, I love this: figuring out how to do certain things well and repeating the process again’’, Kavula attests. “Sometimes I have to start the process all over again because there is a mistake that I usually spot very quickly with my naked eye… I am also learning what the threads can and cannot do’’, she candidly adds. There is a kind of circuitous trajectory in the process of making the work that requires power negotiations with the material. A kind of reconversion that is first generated from transforming the geometric shweshwe patterns into tiny, punctured discs that become glued onto threaded strands: a process of circularity.
If, like me, you have been following Kavula’s work for a while, you will know that her artmaking is variegated, experimental and interdisciplinary. From comics and zines to her rap visual artist character, ‘Black Mona Lisa’ that gestures to notions of identity and Black womanhood; to her institutional critique of the ‘art world’ in her stand-up comedy performances and her collectivist practice in the Cape Town-based artist collective that she co-formed, iQhiya. These are some of the extensions in her art practice that are itinerant in this body of work, albeit implicitly. However, the circularity of revisiting oeuvres in her earlier works is similarly contingent to a dynamic that functions as both continuity and renewal.”
As with the Modernist, minimalist artists which Kavula’s work has been likened to (although coming from a different time and context), Kavula’s art and art-making practice can be seen as asking critical questions about art itself. In this sense her artworks are self-aware, deconstructing and abstracting the medium to its most basic parts. Kavula configures simplistic yet mathematically intricate and calculated (by observation) artworks, using basic components such as line, colour and texture to create spatial fields of depth, which viewers can “travel through […] with the eye”² , as the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg noted. While creating artworks which are abstract in nature, Kavula’s works are not bound to strictly formalist readings. In 3x an abstraction: New methods of drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin (2005), curator and art historian Catherine de Zegher explains that the three artists listed in the title approach “non-objectivity and geometric abstraction not as a kind of formalism, but as a means of structuring philosophical, linguistic, scientific and transcendental ideas”.³ While formalist in nature, Kavula’s work can similarly be seen as giving non-figurative form to metaphysical ideas.
¹ Keogotsitse, N. 2021. Discovery rather than creation: Bonolo Kavula’s ‘sewedi sewedi’, Arthrob. Available at: https://artthrob.co.za/2021/04/14/discovery-rather-than-creation-bonolo-kavulas-sewedi-sewedi/
² Greenberg, C. 1965. Modernist painting, in Frascina, F. & Harrison, C. (eds). 1982. Modern art and Modernism: A critical anthology.
³ De Zegher, C. 2005. 3x an abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Selected Press Highlights
Bonolo Kavula wins the debut Norval Sovereign Art Prize
Qwesha, J.D. 2022. Unique style: Where meaningful artistic conventions are born. Mail&Guardian [online].
Brownell, G. 2021. Weaving the Threads of Applied and Contemporary Art. The New York Times [online].
Cotterell, G. 2020. Rebel Printmaker Bonolo Illinois Kavula Toys with Tradition - Experimental Artist Uses Mundane Materials to be Provocative. Wanted Online, Art & Design [online].
Solo Exhibition Catalogues
Khanya, Mashabela, ed 1. Bonolo Kavula: a re kopane ko thabeng. Process and Personal Refuge in the Works of Bonolo Kavula. SMAC Gallery Publishing, 2021; Catalogue of the exhibition; a re kopane ko thabeng. Presented at Booth P16, Art Basel, Miami Beach, 2021. 01 December 2021 – 04 December 2021.
Amogelang, Maledu. Ed 2. Bonolo Kavula: Soft Landing.
Circuitous Trajectories in Bonolo Kavula’s Soft Landing. SMAC Gallery Publishing, 2022; Catalogue of the exhibition of the same name. Presented by SMAC Gallery Cape Town, 17 November 2022 – 28 January 2023.
Collections
Works of Art Committee Collection, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.
Pérez Collection, Miami, Florida.
Cecilia & Ernesto Poma Collection, Miami, Florida.