Simphiwe Buthelezi

Simphiwe Buthelezi (b. 1996, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a South African installation artist and sculptor whose practice is rooted in material exploration, cultural continuity, African spirituality and processes of self-discovery. She received a National Diploma in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg in 2017 and was awarded the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize in 2018.

Buthelezi’s work unfolds through an ongoing process of inward journeying, path-making and personal truth-seeking. She challenges perceived oppositions between tradition and modernity, considering instead how ancient knowledge systems might offer frameworks for contemporary life. Through an intentional reinterpretation of Zulu mythology and African cosmologies, she approaches ancestral artefacts as evolving entities capable of carrying both continuity and transformation, fabulating new mythological realities from inherited forms of knowledge.

Working with materials including ‘icansi’ (traditional hand-woven reed mats), glass beads, ‘tankrali’ (Zulu seed beads), sea sand, seashells, metal and canvas, Buthelezi places materiality and form at the centre of this enquiry. Through cutting, folding, sewing and bonding, she reshapes materials passed down through generations while retaining their agency and sculptural integrity. This approach is closely connected to ‘ukubuyela e masisweni’ – “returning to the source” – an existential and spiritual undertaking through which intergenerational objects become vessels for cultural memory, ancestral knowledge and new forms of meaning.

For Buthelezi, returning to the source is neither a literal nor nostalgic gesture, but a way of reconsidering relationships to time, history and cultural identity. Her work resists linear conceptions of time in favour of a cyclical understanding in which beings, knowledge and phenomena return across different epochs, each time revealing new possibilities. Within this conception of “counter-time”, ancestral knowledge is not fixed in the past but remains active and generative, capable of shaping alternative ways of inhabiting the present and imagining the future.

Solo exhibitions include Kala at Southern Guild, Cape Town (2026); Scenes in Dreams at SMAC, Cape Town (2024); Imvuselelo Yenkululeko / Freedom’s Domain at SMAC, Stellenbosch (2020); and Lala La, curated by Chumisa Ndakisa at The Bag Factory Artist Studios, Johannesburg (2019). In 2023, she presented Izinyathelo zabagcotshiweyo (Footsteps of the Ordained) in the Galeries Émergentes sector at Paris+ par Art Basel at the Grand Palais Éphémère, France, and Imvuselelo Yenkululeko (The World is Changing) in the SOLO section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. In 2025, her work was included in On the Cusp at the Stellenbosch Triennale, where she presented the installation, To Read a book backwards. Her wider exhibition history includes presentations in Kinshasa, DRC, and Miami, USA.

The Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize culminated in a residency at The Bag Factory Artist Studios in Johannesburg in 2018. In 2024, Buthelezi participated in the SAFFCA Residency in partnership with ENSAV La Cambre in Brussels, Belgium. In 2025, she undertook residencies with the Vancouver Biennale in Canada and Montresso Art Foundation in Morocco and was shortlisted for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize. In 2026, she completed a two-month GUILD Residency in Cape Town, during which she developed the body of work for Kala.

Selected collections include Fondation H, Antananarivo, Madagascar; University of Cape Town, South Africa; the Southern African Fellowship for Contemporary Art; and the Bonanate Collection, Turin, Italy.