Malome

Malome, Bonolo Kavula’s first solo exhibition at Southern Guild since joining the gallery’s artist programme considers the transmission of familial histories across generations, positioning the act of making as a means through which inheritance is reconstituted and memory given material form. Building on the visual and conceptual language Kavula has honed over several years, the new body of work extends her investigation of seshweshwe fabric into sculptural and spatial territory.

For Kavula, making is a way of keeping things alive: a name, a piece of seshweshwe clothing, a repeated gesture. Named in honour of her late uncle, Malome takes its title from the Setswana term for one’s maternal uncle, but its meaning extends beyond biological relation. The form of address conveys respect and familiarity, while also locating kinship within a wider sense of community and belonging.

The term joins a vocabulary developed across Kavula’s successive solo exhibitions. Beginning with Sewedi, Sewedi (2021), titled after her late grandfather’s surname, and continuing through A re kopane ko thabeng (2021), Lewatle (2022), Lebala (2023), and Moya (2024), these titles operate collectively as a kind of poem: fragments of language marking significant moments in Kavula’s artistic and personal journey. Malome becomes its newest articulation, adding another figure to what Kavula describes as an “archive and family constellation of memories, past lives, and utterances between the physical and spiritual realm.”

Central to her practice is shweshwe [1], a textile whose significance moves between intimate experience and broader cultural meaning. Her engagement with the material is shaped by a matrilineal inheritance: in 2011, her great-grandmother entrusted Kavula with a red dress that had belonged to her late mother. Commonly worn at weddings, funerals, and other cultural ceremonies across South Africa, seshweshwe carries both shared histories and personal resonance. Rather than preserving it as an intact symbol of tradition, Kavula transforms its material and visual logic through deconstruction and reassembly. She cuts and punches small discs from the fabric before arranging and threading them into geometric compositions. Pattern becomes fragment; cloth becomes line, field, surface, and volume. Repetition is fundamental, but never mechanical. Each work is made through reiterative gestures, with subtle variations that register the presence of the artist’s hand.

Labour and transformation have long been integral to Kavula’s process. Her grandfather worked as a miner in Kimberley, while her uncle similarly valued work and the sense of purpose and pride it could confer. “My uncle was not given the chance to pursue his education beyond high school, and the systems that should have supported him ultimately failed him. His life came to a tragic end. This reality gives my art-making a sense of urgency,” Kavula shares, “Through my work, I try to mend what could have been for so many members of my family who were not afforded the opportunities I’ve had.” Within Malome, Kavula considers this inheritance alongside the more difficult histories of Black labour in South Africa; shaped by extraction, exclusion, and curtailed possibility. Her own creative labour
becomes both cathartic and generative, with deconstruction serving as a precondition for new forms to emerge. To make, here, is simultaneously to mourn and to create life.

At the centre of the exhibition, After Tears (2026) brings these concerns into contact with a distinctly social architecture. Constructed to the dimensions of beer crates, the installation’s composite forms recall the crates of beer Kavula bought for her uncle’s wake. Its title invokes the gathering following a burial, where drinking can accompany mourning, remembrance, and joy. From an everyday object associated with both the tavern and the funeral, Kavula develops a structure that is neither
representation nor monument. Abstracted and repeated, the crate becomes something closer to a totem: a form through which contradictory experiences – grief and pleasure, violence and tenderness– can coexist.

Alongside this expansion in scale and form, the body of work remains deliberately restrained. The use of grayscale and muted shweshwe lends the exhibition a subtler chromatic register. A recent encounter with the work of Alberto Burri sharpened Kavula’s existing interest in the perceptual possibilities of abstraction: how a limited vocabulary of colour, geometry, and repeated intervention might continually be made unfamiliar. “It is my job as an artist to make it feel new. I want the viewer to feel as if they are
encountering my work for the first time. I think a good artist is able to make you look at the same thing over and over again with renewed attention,” she observes.

These contradictions prevent Malome from settling into elegy alone. Kavula asks what can be inherited, transformed, and carried forward. Here, recollection, like material, can be worked upon: pierced, fragmented, threaded together, and made anew. Through this slow process of undoing and reconstruction, Kavula makes absence tangible without attempting to resolve it.

Malome runs concurrently with Ange Dakouo's solo exhibition, Rien n’est inerte (Nothing Is Inert).


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