Since winning the 2023 Cassirer Welz Award, Bulumko Mbete has been in residency at the Bag Factory in Newtown for three months. The result is I’ve known rivers, a solo exhibition of new work by the artist.

This exhibition features Mbete’s textile manipulation techniques, including weaving, sculpting, beading, and natural dyeing, to showcase women's labour and histories of migration. The artist’s residency space is also open to the public, allowing viewers a chance to see both Mbete’s finished works and her current experiments in the studio, comprised of installation, wood, and textile-based artworks. Altogether, the works in I’ve known rivers prompt further considerations around “challenging and reshaping our relationship with culturally specific textile materials from Southern Africa.”