Simnikiwe Buhlungu is the recipient of the 2025/2026 MTN x UJ New Contemporaries Artist Award. The award is central to the MTN SA Foundation’s commitment to supporting South Africa’s arts sector and creating opportunities for promising young talent. Through this initiative, the MTN SA Foundation and UJ Art Gallery empower emerging curators by providing curatorial and institutional support, helping to launch their careers and develop the next generation of contemporary South African artists and curators.
Presented by UJ Art Gallery in partnership with the MTN SA Foundation, the award continues to platform bold, critical and future-facing contemporary South African art practices.
The exhibition Holding sp(l)ace for the in__between is situated within the complexities of the contemporary moment, refusing thematic closure to make contemporaneity itself a character of the exhibition engaging questions of refusal, collective survival, and Black feminist thought through sound, land, home, and breath. Distinct in approach yet united in their provocation, each artist navigates the exhibition’s in-between through the particularities of their practice.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s iterative sound installation, rooted in gospel and diasporic memory, engages histories of Black mobility and collective listening.
