LEBOHANG KGANYE

Kganye is the recipient of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize, 2024 for her exhibition Haufi Nyana? I’ve Come to Take you Home, which took place at Foam, Amsterdam (2023). Other notable recent awards include the Foam Paul Huf Award, 2022, Grand Prix Images Vevey, 2021/22; and Camera Austria Award, 2019.

The artist has recently exhibited at TATE, The Barnes Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, and others. In 2022, Kganye was one of three artists exhibited in Into the Light, the South African Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. 

Kganye’s work is held in public collections including the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Victoria and Albert Museum, Verbund Collection, Walther Collection, and Carnegie Art Museum, among others.

Working often with the concepts of “postmemory” and “rememory” (as defined by Marianne Hirsch and Toni Morrison respectively), and often in an autobiographical lens, Kganye in Shadows of Re-Memory (2021) evokes hauntology not based on familial narratives, but this time on literary pieces: plays The Road to Mecca (1984) and The Train Driver (2010) by South African playwright Athol Fugard, and the non-fiction Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past (2004) by Lauren Beukes.

Lebohang Kganye spent weeks walking along the gravel roads of Nieu Bethesda where Fugard worked. During her stay, the artist interviewed local residents: a restorer, a beekeeper, a violin string maker, and a translator of Fugard’s books. The stories she collected morph with literary plots, memory and fantasy to  constitute the scenes of the film.

The artist began the series two years after her mother passed away. She was looking through her mother’s photo albums and realized that a lot of the clothes that she was wearing were still in her wardrobe. These clothes that she had worn in her 20s and 30s had out-lived her and became archives, similar to photographs, of the person. 

Kganye could recognize where some of the photos had been taken so, with the help of her grandmother, she decided to trace back the location of these photographs, wore the same clothes, re-staged the images and then superimposed her image on top of her mother’s image, so it became one. 

It was her way of marrying her mother’s memories with her own.