In RFI, Siegfried Forster interviews curator Azu Nwagbogu about the work of Lebohang Kganye in the exhibition Liberated Bodies at Paris Photo 2024.
Siegfried Forster:
We're here in front of Lighthouse Burials (2022), a photographic installation by Lebohang Kganye, a South African artist, born in 1990. Through this work, would you give us an example how we can reappropriate archives, history ? How is it possible to give a new meaning, a new dimension to a photo ?
Azu Nwagbogu:
In this work, you see that there's earth. Land is a very controversial subject in South Africa. Post-apartheid means that people are free to do what they want. There is no longer segregation, but there is still segregation according to social class. Land redistribution is an important element in the discussion. Lebohang Kganye has therefore used archival images of the land and its ownership in her work, and has inserted herself into these archives, into this history.
She can't go back in time to live on this land, but she can appropriate the images of this land and draw a story from them. In Lighthouse Burials, she digs. She digs and digs into history. She digs where she stands. This refers to a philosophy developed by Sven Lindqvist (1932-2019). This Swedish writer and philosopher said that we should dig where we find ourselves, that we should interrogate our history. This image behind me is a perfect metaphor for this idea of interrogating history by digging into images and reimagining what they can do.
