If there’s any topic the inhabitants of this city can universally relate to it’s dampness. Our wet, clammy homes on this wet, clammy island are uncomfortably, uncontrollably moist, mouldy, humid places. And now the Chisenhale is too.
Because Amsterdam-based South African artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu has turned the gallery into a living, breathing liquid ecosystem. It’s a meditation on water and its accumulation, distribution and unstoppable cyclical spread.
Dotted around the space are buckets of water. One is full of liquid collected from a puddle outside the gallery, others are filled with water from the artist’s mother’s garden in Johannesburg, the Tswaing Crater in South Africa, a nature reserve in Italy.
The wooden doors as you walk in are warped from having been dumped in the canal outside, paper drawings on the wall curl away from the damp walls, two zithers on the ground are played by machines, their strings loosening and tightening as the humidity levels in the room change.
Buhlungu imagines water as a form of information that moves between places and people, evaporating in Africa and falling as rain in Europe, maybe. Just like people, history, goods and knowledge, water travels and brings with it ideas and narratives, it changes and mutates, and in the process it changes and mutates the places it lands and falls.
Although this is inarguably just some buckets of water in a room, it's still clever art with interesting ideas, even if England really didn’t need to get any damper than it already is.