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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.
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Two Stories of (Hi)Stories (2023)
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Lebohang Kganye makes reference to Christraud Geary’s essay ‘On the Savannah: Marie Pauline Thorbecke’ published in the Art Journal in 1990 titled ‘Depictions of the Dispossessed.’ Kganye is not interested in centering colonial protagonists. Rather, she slips into all the roles herself and uses existing images and narratives to implicate lesser-known subjectivities.
In this series, six scenes are set in lit diorama boxes, in which the artist assembles historical photographs by Marie Pauline Thorbecke from the museum‘s archive with episodes of Cameroonian history related to the the Kingdom of Bamum, founded in 1394. These become the backdrop to the artist’s performance of various significant protagonists in a contested ‘master’ narrative.
In this way, the artist deconstructs the colonial context of the archival images and situates their meaning in a contemporary interrogation of the authorship of historical narratives in the contemporary. The “two stories of (hi)stories” are thus complemented by a reimagined perspective — her own.
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Keep The Light Faithfully (2022)
In Keep the Light Faithfully (2022), Lebohang Kganye re-imagines western literature of the rarely known and gendered narratives of hundreds of women light keepers from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Kganye searched for women lightkeepers in South Africa to no avail, but she used oral histories and staging to invite new imaginaries. The series faithfully reenacts the oral histories of seven current and former Lighthouse-Keepers, living in some of the most isolated parts of South Africa – along the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape coastlines.
The works implement the act of cutting, folding, pasting and assembling medium or life-sized elements to construct each scene. These moveable paper elements of cardboard cut-outs create the illusion of a theatre set and proposes photography both as practice and object. Each cut-out creates the illusion of an entire world - they look like they could be moved, changed or shifted. The work emphasises the fabricated nature of history and memory: how the visualisation of an event always induces an element of creation, experimentation and error; an on-going construction.
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Recent Exhibitions and News
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LEBOHANG KGANYE | TATE
GROUP EXHIBITION 6 July 2023 - 14 January 2024Lebohang Kganye participated in the group exhibition A World in Common at Tate Modern, curated by Osei Bonsu. Bringing together a group of artists from different generations, this exhibition will... -
LEBOHANG KGANYE | DEUTSCHE BÖRSE PRIZE
WINNER 16 May 2024Lebohang Kganye won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for her exhibition Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home at Foam, Amsterdam in 2023. The prize was accompanied... -
LEBOHANG KGANYE | ALBERTINA MUSEUM
GROUP EXHIBITION 29 February - 5 May 2024Lebohang Kganye participated in the group exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna celebrating 20 years of the Verbund Collection. The term feminist avant-garde was coined by VERBUND COLLECTION’s founding... -
LEBOHANG KGANYE | FOAM
SOLO EXHIBITION 17 February - 21 May 2023Winner of the Paul Huf Award, Lebohang Kganye was granted a solo exhibition at Foam Amsterdam titled Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home. Lebohang Kganye focuses on exploring...
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Learn More About the Artist
LEBOHANG KGANYE | PHOTOGRAPHS
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