Lindokuhle Sobekwa won the 2023 FNB Art Prize. Now his solo exhibition Umkhondo: Going Deeper will be at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, in collaboration with Goodman Gallery, from the 24th of August 2024 until the 23rd of March 2025. The exhibition unites two interconnected bodies of work — I Carry Her Photo With Me and Ezilalini (The Country) — seen together for the first time. Born in 1885, Sobekwa is from a generation of South African photographers born after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.
In Ezilalini (The Country) bucolic rolling hills and entirely flat landscapes belie the beauty and the scars of erosion that quietly mark the landscape. Reflecting on the horizon as a place where one never fully arrives, Sobekwa documents his journey from Katlehong, Gauteng where he was born to his ancestral home in Tsomo, the Eastern Cape where his maternal grandmother still lives. For this exhibition, Sobekwa visited his maternal family in Tsomo and his paternal family in Qumbu and collected his family’s oral history. He then put that into the images to mark significant history and family narratives that go unheard. At the heart of the exhibition lies Sobekwa’s ongoing project, I Carry Her Photo With Me, which he began in 2017, following the painful experience of the disappearance and eventual death of his sister Ziyanda.
Prompted by a found family portrait with Ziyanda’s face missing, I Carry Her Photo With Me, has seen multiple iterations. The project was developed into a handmade photobook for inclusion in African Cosmologies at the FotoFest Biennial Houston in 2020, the project includes a film interpretation which will be shown for the first time in Johannesburg this August. The seven-minute video is an intimate portrait through image, text and sound. Images from the series — colourful clothes hanging on a washing line, the hostel where Ziyanda was found a decade later, hand-written scribbles and notes intertwine over a poetic and melancholic composition which is scored by South African jazz musician and scholar Nduduzo Makhathini.
