Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Ola Hassanain, and Paulo Nimer Pjota

On Saturday, May 17, Kunstinstituut Melly announces three upcoming solo exhibitions featuring newly commissioned works by Ola Hassanain, Paulo Nimer Pjota, and Simnikiwe Buhlungu. These exhibitions are a testament to the institution's dedication to supporting artists in creating work that encourages us to engage deeply with the world around us. 

Simnikiwe Buhlungu is an artist based between Johannesburg and Amsterdam whose practice looks at how knowledge is produced, circulated, and felt. Through installations that bring together sound, sculpture, and publishing, she traces overlooked or invisible systems—working with water, language, and time as mutable forms of inquiry. Her research-led approach finds expression in projects that think with, rather than about, the systems and materials they engage—whether through a footnote, a water droplet, or a whispered story. Simnikiwe creates artworks that resist fixed categories, instead favouring mischief, poetry, and resonance as methods of sensing the world.

Her exhibition hygrosummons (iter.02) transforms the building of Kunstinstituut Melly into a porous, responsive site. Spanning multiple floors—from basement to rooftop, the installation features water samples collected from puddles in Rotterdam, Italy, and South Africa, as well as sonic sculptural instruments tuned to humidity and materials that warp, leak, and shift. These components gather into a constellation that treats the puddle not as a minor detail, but as a generative site of accumulation, contradiction, and relation. 

Ola Hassanain is an Amsterdam-based artist whose practice moves through architecture, film, and spatial practice to question the politics of inhabiting and how power materialises spatially. Engaging sites shaped by climate precarity, displacement, and postcolonial infrastructures, her work reflects on the lived experience of instability—and on how spatial imaginaries might shift in response.

The Watcher, her solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly, reflects on ecological vulnerability and state-induced catastrophe through the figure of the Watcher: a community caretaker in Sudan’s Gezira irrigation scheme, tasked with safeguarding riverbanks and signalling early signs of flood. Centring a three-channel film within a sculptural set inspired by Dutch and Sudanese sites of water engineering, the work weaves together poetic scripts, personal memory, and geopolitical critique. Commissioned by BAK and presented at Kunstinstituut Melly, the installation draws out water’s role not only in destruction, but as a force that resists capture—seeping across temporal, political, and geographic boundaries.

Paulo Nimer Pjota is a São Paulo-based artist whose painting practice channels the spirit of remix. Drawing from archaeology, street culture, mythology, and pop iconography, he builds layered compositions that often unfold across raw canvas and scrap metal. Paulo sees equivalence between his role as an artist and that of a hip-hop producer sampling sounds; he lifts and collages imagery across time periods and contexts—dissolving distinctions between varied forms of visual, popular, and cultural iconography. 

With A Lua e Eu (The Moon and I), Paulo debuts an entirely new body of work that marks a shift in focus—from urban visual culture to the rural environments of his youth. Drawing on memories of growing up in São José do Rio Preto, this exhibition moves through interior scenes, plant life, and mythological figures to explore more introspective terrain. The compositions are looser, more surreal, and at times nostalgic—referencing early sketchbook drawings and domestic symbols from his youth. While the approach to layering and sampling remains, this latest work reveals a quieter, more reflective tone—a turn shaped by distance, memory, and change.