The work of photographer and visual artist Lebohang Kganye is highlighted in new exhibit, “Tell Me What You Remember.” The exhibition is presented by the Barnes Foundation in its Roberts Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, through May 21, 2023.
Lebohang Kganye, a visual artist and photographer, was born in Johannesburg in 1990. Her work explores themes of personal history and ancestry while resonating with South Africa’s history and apartheid. She does this by fusing the archival and performative into a practice that places a focus on storytelling and memory as it manifests in the familial experience.
Although primarily a photographer, her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in myriad ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative, theatrical and the moving image. While her writing may speak to a South African experience specifically, it critically connects with oral tradition as form and memory, as well as a concrete source of information. Kganye uses narrative to express stories about home, shelter, family, and identity. She mostly uses her family archive to examine and re-enact ideas of home and belonging.
In the joint exhibition, “Tell me What you remember,” with Sue Williamson they offer a cross-racial and generational dialogue on history, memory and the power of self-narration in the context of apartheid and its legacies.
Featuring 15 bodies of work spanning 1981 to 2023 that represent the full breadth of both artists’ practices. The exhibition features Kganye’s video installation Dipina tsa Kganya (2021) and her new photography series In Search for Memory (2020 and 2022) and more.
“Losing a parent makes loss not just a concept, but something you cannot quite articulate without the experience of it,” Kganye tells EBONY. “My grandmother began talking to me about our family history and sharing stories that had been passed on to her and her own memories. I began to think about how much we do not think about conversations we would love to have with our elders until the possibility of loss becomes real. The narrative of my work about family has been an extension of these conversations with my grandmother and has extended to other elders of the family such as my aunts and uncles.”
Lebohang Kganye received her introduction to photography at the Market Photo Workshop, in Johannesburg, in 2009 and completed the Advanced Photography Programme in 2011. She obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2014 and is currently doing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University.
Notable recent awards include the Foam Paul Huf Award 2022, Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/22, Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, 2020, Camera Austria Award, 2019.
