Lebohang Kganye

Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg, and forms a new generation of contemporary South African photographers. Primarily known for her photography, Kganye often incorporates the archival and performative into a practice that centres storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience. Her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in a myriad of ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative and moving image. While her work may resonate with a particularly South African experience; it critically engages with oral tradition as form and memory as a tangible source material.

Kganye is currently completing her Master in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University; she studied Fine Arts at the University of Johannesburg (2016); and Photography at the Market Photo Workshop (2011).

She 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.

Kganye’s recent solo exhibitions with newly commissioned work include Shall You Return Everything, but the Burden, Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne, Germany (2023) and Dipina tsa Kganya: Leave the Light on When You Leave for Good, Georgian House Museum, Bristol, UK (2022). A two-person exhibition Tell Me What You Remember with Kganye and Sue Williamson was recently presented by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (2023). 

Recent touring group exhibitions include David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive, Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024-25); Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Photographers’ Gallery, London and The Cube, Frankfurt (2024); A World in Common, Tate Museum, London and Wereld Museum, Rotterdam (2023-24); and As We Rise, by Aperture, Art Museum, University of Toronto, Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem and Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax (2022-24). 

In 2022, Kganye was one of three artists exhibited in Into the Light, the South African Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. She has participated in biennales and triennials around the world including RAY ECHOES as part of the Triennial of Photography, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt, Germany (2024); Currency as part of the Triennale of Photography Hamburg at the Hall of Contemporary Art in Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2022); Afterglow, Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan (2020).

Kganye’s work is held in public collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC and the Art Institute of Chicago; Chazen Museum of Art, Wisconsin; Getty Museum, LA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; JP Morgan Art Collection, New York; Carnegie Art Museum, Pennsylvania; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Fondation Francès, Senlis; FRAC Réunion, Réunion; Verbund Collection, Vienna; Walther Collection, Ulm amongst others. 

At the Stellenbosch Triennial, Lebohang Kganye will be presenting her animated film Shadows of Re-Memory, 2021. In 2018, Lebohang Kganye spent weeks walking along the gravel roads of the small town of Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo of the Eastern Cape where Athol Fugard found inspiration from literary pieces: plays The Road to Mecca (1984) and The Train Driver (2010) by Athol Fugard, and the non-fiction Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past (2004) by Lauren Beukes* — all connected through the presence of interesting female characters.

This film develops Kganye’s established practice of using cut-paper photo-collage, which is animated in three dimensions to create a moving piece. It takes the viewer on a journey through a semi-fictitious town that combines specific references to the village of Nieu-Bethesda, with a wider, timeless representation of South Africa. Through a series of uncanny events inspired by South African art and literature, the film’s narrative travels a fictional history that reveals the power of storytelling in the legacies of collective cultural experience.

During her stay, the artist interviewed the local residents: a restorer, a beekeeper, a violin string maker, and a translator of Fugard’s books. Stories of villagers narrated to artists in relation to Road to Mecca constitute the scenes shown in Shadows of Re-Memory. 

*The Road to Mecca was inspired by the story of an artist Helen Martins, who lived in Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape, and turned her home into a so-called “The Owl House” with a garden filled with visionary sculptures. The Train Driver revolves around a white train driver who unwillingly killed a black woman and her baby — she stepped onto the tracks in front of the train because of poverty and desperation. Maverick is a collection of stories about lives of some of South Africa’s most notorious women in the last 350 years, including the biography of Helen Martins.