In Vogue France, Lolita Mang profiles Lebohang Kganye ahead of her presentation with the gallery at Paris Photo 2024.
It's hard to place Lebohang Kganye on the spectrum of contemporary photography. His work is so intimate that it resembles none of her peers. Is the lack of representation of African artists to blame? No doubt, but it should also be pointed out that the young woman's work is distinguished by the plurality of the mediums she employs, as well as by its evolution over the years. Beginning as a reflection on the object embodied by the photo album, in a post-apartheid South Africa, the work of Lebohang Kganye has metamorphosed, slowly but surely, into a more global reflection on notions of heritage and colonization. A dialogue between present and past that the artist delights in maintaining, often embodying her own characters herself, like the ghost of an unreal space-time. In Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story (2013), her very first work, for example, the silhouette of the daughter responds to that of the mother, in an impossible evanescent conversation. Her body, rendered in vaporous contours, becomes the double stranger to her own mother.
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