The Braided Bone Chamber is a large-scale hanging sculpture by Congolese artist Patrick Bongoy, made for BMW South Africa in partnership with Southern Guild. The artwork combines recycled rubber and coloured light to create a dynamic counterpoise that speaks to an awakening of consciousness and gentler way of living – a message that resonates with BMW’s evolution towards electromobility.

Bongoy’s work transforms the inner tubes of discarded tyres into intricate, textural forms that draw on Africa’s rich history of making by hand. The sculpture is illuminated from the inside, revealing a stencilled extract from ‘Lydia in the Wind’, a poem by celebrated South African writer and performer Malika Ndlovu. A frequent collaborator of Bongoy’s, Ndlovu also wrote the poem from which this artwork derives its title.

The Braided Bone Chamber is featured in Bongoy’s solo exhibition at Southern Guild, titled Unseen Dimensions of the Known (4 August – 1 September, 2022). Much of Bongoy’s work speaks to transformative thresholds, living on the edge, in limbo or between worlds, reaching beyond the violence of binaries, oversimplified narratives and realities. While these may seem volatile and intimidating spaces to explore, Bongoy does so with a deep listening and observation as integral to his creative process. By entering such ‘chambers’ you are invited to keep letting go of first impressions and assumptions, to empty and deepen your listening, allowing openness and presence (with these works) to be an experience of quiet revelation and connection.

While The Braided Bone Chamber resurfaces some of Bongoy’s consistent themes – regeneration, migration and courageous movement from the known to unknown – here he intentionally works with binding story/lines. These are stories we are born into, the stories ‘in our bones’ across generations and over time, the stories impacted by erasure and forgetting, the ones which haunt and ignite artists to re-collect, re-member and re-weave them.

Such stories initiate a resonance with the stories of many others, offering us all a place for ongoing conversation in the literal sense and beyond words. As the entry point to his solo exhibition at Southern Guild, Bongoy is also expanding on his practice of ongoing collaboration with fellow artists, whose work constantly seeks to unearth and integrate that which has been scattered, broken or unhealed.