-
-
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.
-
Two Stories of (Hi)Stories (2023)
-
In this series, six scenes are set in lit diorama boxes, in which the artist assembles historical photographs by Marie Pauline Thorbecke from the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Cologne'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.
Kganye problematizes the mythologising gaze of Marie Pauline Thorbecke. She does so by introducing oral accounts of the story of the Kingdom of Bamum, gathered during a 13-day journey to the region, as well as literature by Cameroonian authors Idrissou Njoya and Nji Arouna Nchouwet Ndassa. The works counter the gaze of Western historians that have written on the German Colonial Period in 1880s Cameroon.
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.
She 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.
-
Keep The Light Faithfully (2022)
In Keep the Light Faithfully (2022), Lebohang Kganye layers oral testimonies with critical fabulation to imagine new histories. She collected the accounts of the few surviving lighthouse keepers still working in South Africa, gathering their memories of both adventure and monotony. She searched for female lighthouse keepers, after having read of women in the profession in literature, but she found no trace of women in the industry in South Africa. So she created a character and inserted herself into the history.
Each lightbox brings to life a true tale from the lighthouse keeper’s stories, but altered slightly with the artist playing a central role.
The works implement the act of cutting, folding, pasting and assembling. These moveable paper elements of cardboard cut-outs create the illusion of a theater 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 emphasizes the fabricated nature of history and memory: how the visualization of an event always induces an element of creation, experimentation and error; an on-going construction.
-
-
Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2022-2023)
-
Shadows of Re-Memory (2021)
-
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.
-
-
Ke Lefa Laka (2013)
Re intshitse mosebetsing II, 2013, Archival Pigment Print, 29.7 x 42 cm -
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.
-
-
Learn More About the Artist
-
Recent Exhibitions and News
-
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 | 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... -
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 | VOGUE
PRESS 6 November 2024In Vogue France, Lolita Mang profiles Lebohang Kganye ahead of her presentation with the gallery at Paris Photo 2024. It's hard to place Lebohang Kganye on the spectrum of contemporary... -
LEBOHANG KGANYE | RFI
PRESS 7 November 2024In 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... -
LEBOHANG KGANYE | FRANCE 24
PRESS 8 November 2024Dheepthika Laurent talks to Lebohang Kganye, recipient of the 2024 prestigious Deutsche Börse photography prize. The South African visual artist is displaying her work at the 27th edition of Paris... -
PARIS PHOTO | LE FIGARO
PRESS 9 November 2024In Le Figaro, Valérie Duponchelle and Béatrice de Rochebouët write on the gallery's presence at Paris Photo, including the works of Lebohang Kganye and Gordon Matta-Clark. Among the discoveries, many...
-
LEBOHANG KGANYE
Current viewing_room
