SOUTHERN GUILD ARTIST PROFILE: BONOLO KAVULA
Bonolo Kavula was born in 1992 in Kimberley, South Africa, and currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. She 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, Kavula creates works that 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 Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2014, majoring in printmaking. She received the 2014 Katrine Harries Print Cabinet Award at UCT in 2014 and was short-listed for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize in 2021. She is a founding member of iQhiya, a collective of Black women artists in Cape Town and Johannesburg working across performance art, video, photography, sculpture and other mediums.
Kavula presented her first solo exhibition, sewedi sewedi, in 2021 followed by Soft Landing in 2022, both at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town. In 2024, she presented a solo booth at Art Basel Hong Kong following her solo booth presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2022. In 2025, Kavula presented at Frieze Los Angeles with Southern Guild. Other projects include a solo booth in the TOMORROWS/TODAY section at the 2020 Investec Cape Town Art Fair; Art Times, a performance at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, in 2019; and Twenty Sexy, a performance at blank projects in Cape Town.
She held her first solo museum exhibition, Lewatle, at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town in 2022 and has works in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
Kavula has participated in group exhibitions including Speculative Enquiry #1: On Abstraction at the Michaelis Galleries in Cape Town (2019), The Main Complaint, curated by Michaela Limberis at Zeitz MOCAA, and Shady Tactics, curated by Thuli Gamedze at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town (2018); Atomic Peace at Bag Factory in Johannesburg (2017); iQhiya Group Exhibition at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town and New Monuments at Commune1 in Cape Town, both in 2016.
