Unseen. a wide-ranging exhibition featuring sculpture, tapestries, painting and site-specific installations, opening 4 August (until 29 September). This is the Congolese artist’s first solo since joining Southern Guild in 2021, and his fourth in South Africa since relocating here in 2013.
Bongoy’s work to date has largely reinterpreted the ongoing human and environmental erosion, violent economic extraction, forced migration and exploitation in his native DRC. Unseen Dimensions of the Known extends towards themes of wider resonance with the human condition, beyond the physical aspects of our identities, and what personal or collective liberation and fulfilment of our purpose means. Bongoy continues to create an innovative visual language with rubber and hessian, and to engage in collaboration once more with South African poet Malika Ndlovu.
Bongoy has built a multi-disciplinary practice whose central feature is his industrious and highly textural reuse of rubber from the inner tubes of tyres. Congo’s brutal past and present continue to reverberate through his work, but now the artist finds himself drawn to a deeper sense of enquiry. In Unseen Dimensions of the Known, he reaches for an ‘other’ knowledge, an untrammelled humanity that binds us.
In its usual form, rubber is inert and impermeable, absorbent of almost all light and colour. Bongoy’s studio operates like a factory in reverse, transforming stockpiles of the industrial material into various states of textile-like plasticity through manual intervention. Deployed in both figurative and abstract scenarios, it takes on an expressivity that surprises, satisfies and confronts; here falling like drapery, there forming armour-like platelets. Through his intensely physical engagement with his medium – by cutting, stitching, weaving, braiding, wrestling with and manipulating his materials – he is reaching, paradoxically, for the unseen. collections, and features prominently in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000 – 2018, edited by Makhosazana Xaba (UKZN Press, 2019). Her next collection, Grief Seed, will be published later this year. Consistently promoting healing through creativity, she is a member of the Arts in Psychosocial Support national network of practitioners.
