Kala by Simphiwe Buthelezi considers ways to measure a world beyond calculation

Southern Guild will present Kala, the South African artist Simphiwe Buthelezi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery at their Cape Town location, on view from September 18 – November 12, 2026. The title Kala is an isiZulu imperative meaning ‘weigh it’ or ‘measure it’. The contemporary artist takes this seemingly straightforward command as the starting point for a broader investigation into the limits of measurement. “In a pervasive societal milieu where value is increasingly determined by metrics, productivity and modes of extraction, Buthelezi attempts to measure what refuses calculation: hope, memory, collective dignity, spiritual inheritance and the distance between who we are and who we might yet become. What forms of knowledge remain, she asks, when conventional systems of measurement no longer suffice?” Southern Guild notes in an official release.

The multidisciplinary artist’s practice is grounded in the principle of ukubuyela emasisweni, or ‘returning to the source’. Working predominantly with traditional Zulu materials, including icansi (handwoven reed mats), tankrali (Zulu seed beads), and glass beads, she approaches these materials as living repositories of knowledge. Across Kala, spheres, contours, grids and fragmented landscapes will recur. The works will evoke celestial maps, geological formations and ancient navigational tools, occupying an uncertain space between the terrestrial and the esoteric. “These forms become tools with which Buthelezi attempts to locate the self within a world that feels increasingly unstable: to take measure of how far we have strayed, what has been lost, and what might still be recovered,” the contemporary art gallery explains.

A sphere titled Mhlaba will be a focal point for the art exhibition. Neither entirely complete nor intact, the work appears suspended between formation and erosion. “It evokes the Earth, but also a charged body; one marked by extraction, transformation and latent potential. Its surface is layered with tactile constellations built from cut segments of ‘icansi’, traditional mats handwoven from iNcema bulrushes,” the art gallery explains. Elsewhere, The Abacus transforms an ancient instrument of calculation into a meditation on everything that calculation cannot contain. “Ebonised, handmade clay beads shift across a series of open contour lines. Released from the confines of the abacus's conventional four-sided boundary, the instrument becomes mutable and porous, exposed to forces of motion, time, deduction and addition,” the gallery notes.

Together, the exhibition’s recurring forms—orb, contour, grid and horizon—operate less as representations than as devices for orientation. At the heart of this enquiry is a return to ancestry. “‘I am aware that I am ancient’, Buthelezi has shared, gesturing toward the understanding that this knowing moves across generations through ritual, ancestral lineage, spiritual gifts and the embodied act of art-making. Her materials become a didactic device, a kind of spiritual technology: holding information from the past, while generating new insights for those who come after,” Southern Guild notes.

In Kala, making is both inward and outward. It is a means of locating the artist within a continuum that extends beyond the boundaries of an individual lifetime, while simultaneously transmitting knowledge to the future. “Ultimately, Kala asks not how we measure the world, but what we choose to measure. It invites an alternative currency of value; one rooted in attention, care and the belief that making remains a vital way of processing the conditions of the present,” Southern Guild concludes.