Bonolo Kavula African, b. 1992

Born in 1992, Kimberly, Bonolo Kavula lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Kavula 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, she creates works which 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 BA(FA) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2014, majoring in Printmaking. She is a founding member of iQhiya, a collective of Black women artists working across performance, video, photography and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo presentations at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (2025), and her first solo museum exhibition, Lewatle, at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2022). Her work is held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and the Iziko South African National Gallery.