Bonolo Kavula

b. 1992, Kimberly, South Africa.
Lives and Works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Bonolo Kavula explores the language of printmaking beyond its traditional confines through her use of thread and punched Shweshwe fabric as an exercise of abstraction. Combining print, design, painting and sculpture, she creates works which are both dynamic and restrained in composition, using the repetition of tiny fabric cut-outs, tenuously connected by individual threads, she recreates the canvas with new, more intricate planes. Although the work is formalist in nature, the materials speak back to ideas of colonialism, family and shared histories. The use of Shweshwe fabric is deeply rooted in Kavula’s own memory of her family, as well as in Southern Africa’s wider colonial memory. The process is that of excessive repetition, each dot with its own landscape of minutiae, telling of the meditative action of labour, and of the creation of new meaning through deconstruction and transformation.

Kavula obtained a BA(FA) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2014, majoring in Printmaking. Kavula received the 2014 Katrine Harries Print Cabinet Award at the University of Cape Town and she was a founding member of the Cape Town based artist collective, iQhiya.

In 2022, Kavula presented her first solo museum exhibition titled Lewatle at the Norval Foundation, in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as a solo exhibition, Soft Landing, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2021, she presented a solo booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, titled a re kopane ko thabeng, as well as her first solo exhibition, sewedi sewedi, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town. Her works are included in the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) Collection in Miami, USA, and the Iziko South African National Gallery Collection in Cape Town, South Africa. In late 2023, Kavula is set to commence an artist-in-residence programme at Fondation CAB, in Brussels, Belgium.

Submitted by SMAC