In a meme that went viral last year, two men sit on opposite sides of the bus: one is looking out of the window with an excited smile on his face, holding a pair of binoculars. His side of the bus is sunny and Technicolor. Across from him is his double – except he looks miserable. On his side, it’s raining and everything is grey – it speaks of a deep existential dread. His posture is different: his shoulders droop, his head hangs. The divided self in meme format. But, the point is, the bus is moving. These men are on their way somewhere – where, we don’t know. The two men’s reactions emerge from their respective relationships to the unknown. One is in it just for the ride, the other is racked with anxiety over his final destination.
Most of us have felt like both of these men, inhabiting the in-between spaces of our lives, filled with terror and/or thrilled at the uncertain possibilities that lie ahead. A restless state of neither coming nor going that finds expression in two exhibitions that opened in London this September: Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s ‘hygrosummons (iter.01)’ at Chisenhale Gallery and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s ‘It Will End in Tears’ at The Curve, Barbican. Buhlungu’s solo show is her first in the UK, while Sunstrum’s is her first at a major UK institution. And both deal with the vagaries of human limitation, the ends to which our knowledge is put to use, and the way in which culture creates strictures, rules and paradigms for knowing – all attempts to contain the overwhelming reality that there is so much knowledge beyond our reach.
Buhlungu’s ‘hygrosummons (iter.01)’ is a site-specific installation commissioned and produced by Chisenhale. It uses the ‘puddle’ as its starting point, but, here, ‘puddle’ is less a small body of water sitting idly on the gallery floor and more metaphor and mode of thought. Taking into consideration the isiXhosa word amanz’amile, meaning ‘water is waiting’, Buhlungu conveys the ways water joins together histories, geographies and biological life forms – forms which can be said to ‘know’ and ‘remember’ in ways distinct from human models of knowledge, thereby unsettling our assumed superiority to the non-human. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a large-scale hygrometer – a device used to measure moisture content in the air.
It is constructed from a combination of natural and manmade materials: clay, bamboo, raffia, plastic buckets, paper, wood and water samples taken from puddles at a range of sites, including Tswaing crater in South Africa, Salse di Nirano in Italy, a patch of maize growing in the artist’s mother’s garden in Johannesburg and Chisenhale itself. The hygrometer responds to the humidity generated by the water samples and via sensors stimulates the plucking of handmade string instruments, similar to mvets from Central Africa. As the wood expands and contracts with the changing humidity, the instruments gradually go out of tune.
Sunstrum’s extravagant installation, designed especially for The Curve in collaboration with Remco Osório Lobato, is the novelistic counterpart to Buhlungu's work of critical theory. The artist began preparing for ‘It Will End in Tears’ by creating elaborate storyboards in the manner of a film director. Sunstrum invites her viewers into a village idyll, a portrait of rural life in an imaginary 20th-century colonial outpost, complete with porches, staid garments and an aura of restriction.
Think of the writings of Doris Lessing, Bessie Head and J.M. Coetzee. Visitors are taken on a journey through domestic spaces, waiting rooms and offices of colonial bureaucracy. The boundaries between spectatorship and participation are disrupted. The viewer’s gaze makes the characters populating Sunstrum’s paintings complicit in the mystery at the heart of the installation; vision, here, enacts power – something they know all too well and use to their advantage. Devised as a riposte to the femme fatale archetype, the exhibition draws inspiration from crime fiction novels, film noir and southern gothic. There is an air of pastiche, but also an attempt to examine how viewers relate and respond to the limited knowledge that the work provides and the role that fiction plays in buttressing our conception of what is true and what is real.
On the surface, these two exhibitions couldn’t be more dissimilar. Buhlungu’s is absent of people, eschews traditional ideas of narrative, and revels in formlessness and ephemerality. Sunstrum’s work is character-driven, marrying literary and film genres with the visual language of painting and theatrical set designs. Yet, the heavily constructed aspect of this work hides its philosophical underpinnings: while the viewers might think they are in a whodunit, the paintings are also an analysis of what it means to construct and believe in a fictional or imaginary world. Buhlungu’s and Sunstrum’s shows are united in asking big questions about the nature of making and exhibiting art, and about telling stories.
Buhlungu and Sunstrum look to materialize the indeterminacy of liminal spaces or non-spaces – remember the bus meme – where nothing and everything happens: spaces of becoming instead of being. And, in transferring this liminality to the art space, both artists advance exciting provocations of what it means to unknow and lose one’s bearings, and the need to find them again – all within an environment generally geared towards the acquisition of knowledge. Both artists raise or highlight the temporality and transience of art spaces through their work. Sunstrum is quoted in a press release for the show: ‘I learned that The Curve originally served as a sound barrier: a buffer to contain all manner of performative noise emanating from the adjacent concert hall. I have always been a bit obsessed by such liminal spaces. For me, liminality offers a powerful symbol and speaks to cycles of survival tactics, longing, desire and the pursuit of home and wholeness ... even when squeezed between two barriers, history still persists.’ For Buhlungu, the industrial architecture of Chisenhale offers a blank canvas that allows the work to speak on its own terms, without being overshadowed by its setting, and also offers the visitor an encounter with something transient.
Where we come from impacts and affects what we purport to know. And we remain situated in a space that delineates the limits of our knowing. To enter into an art space is to agree to certain strictures and types of knowledge, or at least be confronted by them – to accept ideas that posit you as subject and the work as object, ideas that delimit how you move around the space and who is welcome, or ideas that carry histories of who is worthy of representation and the privilege of art-making, or even who is worthy of being seen, honoured and accepted within the gallery space. Buhlungu’s and Sunstrum’s work asks how we might break apart certain forms of knowledge and reconstitute them by experiencing art that calls into question what we know and the ways in which we know it, all the while highlighting the ephemerality of the gallery space itself. Once we see that the setting in which we experience the work is not by any means fixed – more a space of becoming rather than being – we also see the world slightly differently and, perhaps, as rich with possibility. We become the man on the right and leave behind the sorrows of his friend to the left.
This article originally appeared in Frieze Week London magazine 2024 with the title ‘Second Thoughts’.
'Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Wli End in Tears' is on view at The Curve, Barbican London, UK, until 5 January 2025.
'Simnikiwe Buhulngu: hygoursmons (iter.01)' is on view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, until 3 November.
Main image: Simnikiwe Buhlungu,Tswaing (sample), 2024. Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London, and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. London. Photo: Andy Keate.
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