THE WORK OF SHADOWS: LEBOHANG KGANYE

La Patinoire Royale Bach’s museum-like nave will be filled with Lebohang Kganye’s large scale image-based installations in The Work of Shadows, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.  

The exhibition features four major bodies of work from the artist’s recent practice. A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023) is a massive, immersive 22-panel video installation the artist made in Cameroun as she followed a colonial era expedition in reverse: symbolically returning objects that had been extracted. Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-2024) are large-scale textile works that feature monumental scale portraits of the artist’s family members. Keep the Light Faithfully (2022) is a series of diorama lightboxes with layered photographic cutouts of the artist reenacting stories she gathered from oral testimonies of South African lighthouse workers. Mohlokomedi wa Tora (2018) is a large-scale circular installation that brings together four scenes from different parts of the artist’s family tree, an exploration of migration, genealogy and light.

Kganye is a pioneering contemporary artist, part of a new generation of South African artists working with image based techniques. She came up through the renowned Market Photo Workshop founded by David Goldblatt and her works have been exhibited in the traveling show dedicated to the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago (2024) and Yale University Art Gallery (2025). With her work with family portraiture and photo albums she builds on the legacy of Santu Mofokeng. Her use of self portraiture to explore questions of identity builds on the work of Zanele Muholi and other artists who use themselves as a vehicle to explore sociological, political and emotional questions. Yet Kganye takes all of these references and art historical threads into new territories with her use of critical fabulation, as Saidiya Hartman theorized, in which she layers deep historical research with imagination and fiction.

In her earlier series Ke Lefa Laka : Herstory (2013) the artist inserted herself into vintage photographs of her mother; in Keep The Light Faithfully (2022) she embodies the layered semi-fictional historical character of a female lighthouse keeper, a melange of real oral histories from the few remaining men working in the field and historical research into women who filled the roles in other contexts. Her use of cutouts, layering and dioramas references both theater, with a nod to William Kentridge, as well as children’s pop-up books in works that are at once poetic, sculptural, and inviting, while engaging major historical and personal themes of decolonization, migration and family.   

The artist uses a myriad of techniques that bring photographic practice into new realms and her contributions to the field are well noted. Kganye is featured in MoMA New Photography 2025 opening in September, and is the winner of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize (2024) for her 2023 solo exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam. The artist has recently exhibited in the traveling exhibition A World In Common: New African Photography at TATE (2024), at the Barnes Foundation in a two person show with Sue Williamson (2023), and many others. Her earliest work is concurrently on view in the exhibition A Partir d’elle, Artists and Their Mother at Fondation A Stichting in Brussels through May 25.