Booth 6A-10
At Art Brussels, Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach presents a solo show dedicated to Lebohang Kganye’s series, Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-24). The presentation coincides with the artist’s major exhibition The Work of Shadows at the gallery, open from April 23 to June 7, 2025.
The South African artist, (b. 1990) works with expanded photography, video and mixed media to create works that layer historiography, research, theatricality, autobiography and poetics in often sculptural installations. The artist’s name is etymologically linked to the Sotho word for light “kganya”; bringing light to layered postcolonial histories is an animating thread in her practice.
Rooted in the artist’s fascination with the Black family photo album — one of the few ways during apartheid that black South African people could document their lives and build their own representation, in Mosebetsi wa Dirithi Kganye extrapolates figures of family members from photo albums to create unique, life size, textile based works.
Kganye singles the figures out and separates them from the context of group pictures to present individuals, monumental and immortalized, floating in negative space. When brought together, these cotton twill stitched collages constitute a gallery of honor, reanimating parts of the artist’s autobiography.
Mosebetsi wa Dirithi translates as “the work of shadows” in Sesotho.
Kganye is featured in MoMA New Photography 2025 opening in September, and is the winner of the 2024 Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize. The artist has recently exhibited at TATE, The Barnes Foundation, and others. In 2022, Kganye exhibited in the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Kganye’s work is held in collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Getty Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and others.
