Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s hygrosummons (iter.01)
May 2025
The hygrometer is a scientific instrument used to measure humidity in the air; that is, how much water vapour it contains. According to a Western canon of science, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci built the first prototype in the 1400s, but it wasn’t until 1783 that the first working hygrometer was invented by the Swiss meteorologist Horace Bénédict de Saussure by using a strand of human hair. Hair, like many organic materials, is naturally hygroscopic, meaning that it readily takes up and holds moisture, expanding and lengthening as it does. By carefully attaching a human hair under tension to a spring, Saussure could measure relative humidity by observing how the strand expanded or contracted to move a needle along a calibrated scale.
An avid alpinist, Saussure designed the hygrometer to study meteorological phenomena such as atmospheric humidity, evaporation, clouds, fog and rain. The instrument enabled him to precisely measure complex natural processes, distilling the water cycle to an abstract numerical value. It also gave Saussure the means to explain these rhythms, demystifying the otherwise intractable high-altitude landscapes he routinely traversed. Often regarded as the father of modern meteorology, our understanding of the water cycle owes much to Saussure’s invention, which has shaped not only our knowledge of water and weather patterns, but also how we relate to this element and its rhythms.
The hygrometer is the starting point of Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s (b.1995) first UK solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Titled hygrosummons (iter.01) this new commission by the Amsterdam-based artist “departs” from the hygrometer “turn[ing] away from accuracy and control…towards convening, sensing and misbehaving with water”. Working across installation, sculpture, and sound Buhlungu summons water into the gallery space to question the ways knowledge is produced, the conditions that mediate our access to it, and if we ever really know what we think we know.
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Entering the gallery visitors are greeted by two large plastic buckets, cheerfully branded ‘Supa PVA’: a cheap, water-based paint. Emptied of their original contents the buckets now serve as “vessels” for “puddle samples”. One sits just outside the gallery entrance, collecting rainwater, while the other is placed in the foyer, “both hold[ing] and leak[ing] the puddle from outside”. Galleries, and art institutions more generally, typically use hygrometers to monitor and control humidity levels to preserve works of art, which are extremely sensitive to the climate. By inviting water into the space, Buhlungu both subverts and interacts with institutional structures, turning the gallery from a controlled space of preservation into a site of unpredictability. In the exhibition handout, the artist reflects on her desire to challenge the institution, asking, “How can we intercept it and bring moisture, water, the puddles into the actual architecture?”. By introducing water into the gallery, Buhlungu not only undermines the infrastructure of the gallery—the water soaking into the walls, pooling on the ground, leaking into crevices—but creates space for changeability. Two bulging wooden doors mark the threshold between the entranceway and Chisenhale’s main exhibition space. Having been “submerged” in the adjacent Hertford Union Canal prior to installation, the pine has warped beyond function. No longer identical or fitting their original frames, they hang askew—waterlogged and unnervingly ajar. Left to “gather water” in the canal for several weeks, the two wooden doors temporarily became something else, “rafts for birdlife, homes for pondweed”. These buckled, failed doors, titled Portends, act as omens, warning visitors of the dissolution of the binary between inside and outside, public and private.
Several more Supa PVA buckets, arranged in groups of two or three, have been distributed around the gallery space, containing further puddle samples. Among them is water from the Tswaing Crater in Sohanguve, South Africa; another, perched high on a window ledge, contains water from the artist’s mother’s backyard maize garden; and a bucket in the far corner holds water from the Salse di Nirano nature reserve in Fiorano Modenese, Italy. Buhlungu has taken each sample from a place of personal significance and brought them together in arrangements to reconstruct an alternative “genealogy”. As the air changes temperature, water molecules from each ‘puddle’ will evaporate and pool again, as part of the natural hydrological cycle, becoming indistinguishable from one another—connecting mischievously across geographical borders as well as time. What would in scientific terms be considered a process of contamination—as each sample becomes muddied by another—instead takes on the process of kinship, defying the rigid categories of Western science.
For the artist, these puddles are also a way of thinking about scale. The Tswaing Crater is the “biggest site” the artist has encountered in her research. Formed by the impact of an asteroid some 220,000 years ago, the Tswaing crater spans 1.4km across and 200 meters deep; large enough to host “four simultaneous football matches and half a million spectators”. “For whom might the crater be a puddle?”, Buhlungu asks in the exhibition handout. In doing so, the artist challenges our conventional understanding of scale and invites us to reconsider how we define a puddle. A puddle can be large or small, a product of rainfall, faulty infrastructure, or even appear as if by magic from the earth beneath us. Despite the term, a puddle is not a single, fixed object but challenges the notion of size, shape and definition.
Claire Louise-Bennetts novel Pond, owes its title to a similar questioning of watery sites and their conceptual labelling. The work takes its name from a moment in the book when the narrator is struck by the absurdity of a sign beside a pond, naming it as such. The sign bothers the narrator because its literalism denies the body of water agency and blocks a “deep and direct accordance with things”. There are ways of knowing the world—hidden depths—that exist beyond naming and categorisation.
In another moment in Pond, the narrator takes a bath and listens attentively to the rumbling of an incoming storm: “I knew it was an old one that had come back…I moved the web of lather about the roots of my hair and became immersed in the body of the storm; I knew its structure, saw its eyes, felt its past, and I empathised with its entreaty”. Here, water transcends its role as a passive element of the natural world, becoming an entity with agency, memory and sight—only accessible through a different kind of embodied knowing. The water in the narrator’s hair enables her to connect with the ‘body of the storm’, across time and place – materially immersed as they both are in the hydrological cycle. The storm, like the pond and Buhlungu’s puddles, cannot be fully understood through labels or scientific observation alone. Instead, it reveals itself through a different kind of connection, one that transcends the limitations of human categorisation.
Buhlungu is similarly interested in our relationship to moments in time through our “ongoing relationship to the water cycle”. Along the walls of the exhibition space hang a series of child-like illustrations of the hydrological cycle. In their simplicity, they are reminiscent of what I was taught about the water cycle in my geography classes during secondary school: water flowing unquestioningly from an unnamed, exotic rainforest into the ocean, only to be evaporated into the atmosphere to become clouds, awaiting its predictable, circular journey to begin again. Being on paper, “a material that often necessitates controlled humidity” the works “disobediently curl away from damp walls, revealing otherwise concealed messages”. Behind each illustration, a chaotic mind-map unfurls offering a counterpoint to the neat, contained narrative on the front. These tangled, sprawling diagrams give voice to the unpredictable and unknowable lives of water—its meandering, elusive journeys of movement and flow. They suggest that water is not a passive, inert substance but rather something animate.
One illustration, titled Piss and Rain, tells the story of human urine, revealing how these invisible flows also affect us. In this story the human body is not merely a passive container but an active participant in the hydrological cycle. As the academic and writer Astrida Neimanis has argued, the fluidity between human and environmental bodies challenges the boundaries we have carefully constructed to separate the human from the non-human, the animate from the inanimate. Neimanis’ work focuses on the idea of “watery bodies,” urging us to view the body as fluid, porous, and relational, rather than fixed, bounded, or stable. In this way, we, too, are part of a vast, watery milieu—fluid, porous, and constantly in motion—in defiance of colonial and epistemological structures that seek to separate, control, and contain.
While the illustrations slowly peel away from the walls, their full story will never fully be revealed or witnessed by the visitor – suggesting an inherent unknowability. To aid the process, the artist has also installed a series of brick air vents into the gallery walls, made from clay from the mud puddles of Salse di Nirano and chalk from Cambridgeshire. These vents release humidity into parts of the building inaccessible to the public, subtly altering the atmosphere. As organic material, the clay absorbs moisture, hardening and releasing water vapor in response to changes in temperature, allowing water to circulate into unseen areas of the gallery. The vents creating invisible flows that resist our knowledge and control. The installation invites us to embrace these fluctuating environmental conditions, proposing alternative ways of sensing, knowing, and measuring the world around us.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is an alternative, large-scale hygrometer. Across the gallery floor sit two zithers, their forms reminiscent of mvets, stringed instruments originating from West and Central Africa. These zithers work through an original score, their strings tightening and loosening as the humidity fluctuates, creating unstable tonal shifts that are captured and played back, “mark[ing] the puddle’s arrival and departure throughout the space”. As the feedback loop of changing humidity alters the tension of the strings, new notes emerge, transforming the musical composition into a living, breathing “call and response” to the fluctuating conditions.
This process challenges conventional ways of measuring and knowing. In the Western scientific tradition, tools like the hygrometer—once developed to measure water vapor through the hygroscopic qualities of human hair—are markers of control. The artist evokes this historical development to question whose bodies are involved in measurement, and how this system has been shaped by colonialism and the extraction of knowledge from non-Western ways of knowing. As Buhlungu notes, “I began by thinking about tools and apparatuses, specifically the hygrometer, and how people measured things thousands of years ago. How might we think about measurement outside of a Western canon of science?”. The hygrometer, like many scientific instruments, emerged from a framework that sought to divide and isolate the human body from its environment, turning it into an object to be contained and measured, while relegating other bodies—human and non-human—to the status of passive or inert.
Unlike Saussure’s original device, the zithers offer a more attuned hygrometer for sensing water, not as a number or static measurement, but as a dynamic, sonic presence. As the artist writes in an interview with Burlington Contemporary, sound “is a way to arrive at a cognisance of various forms of knowledge that sit outside of the ocular. Sound can be a signal for the visual, but it also eschews very limiting and hegemonic understandings of what knowledge production can look like and exist as”. These instruments reveal a more embodied, relational form of measurement—one that embraces the fluidity and ephemerality of water, and by extension, all things. In doing so, Buhlungu asks us to reconsider what we lose when one method of measurement dominates over others. What knowledge is erased when we fail to account for the multiple, embodied ways of understanding the world? Hygrosummons (iter.01) creates the conditions for a decolonial understanding of water, offering a way to engage with it that is not about mastery, but about reanimation—acknowledging the fluid, unknowable nature of the world around us.