Seminar with Lebohang Kganye

Lebohang Kganye is a visual artist and photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work has explored themes of personal history and ancestry whilst resonating with the history of South Africa and apartheid, by incorporating the archival and performative into a practice that centres storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience. While Kganye’s 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 uses mainly her family archive to explore and re-enact notions of home and belonging, she employs narrative to tell stories of home, refuge, family and identity.

Lebohang Kganye’s award-winning work has been shown on a number of group and solo exhibitions all over the world – only in 2023 solo shows were displayed at the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Cologne, Brundyn Arts and Culture in Cape Town, Galleri Image in Aarhus, and FOAM in Amsterdam. Her piece “Messages from the Memory Palace” (2020) is currently exhibited in the Uffizi in the framework of the exhibition “Rooms with a View. Aby Warburg, Florence and the Laboratory of Images”, where it engages in a challenging dialogue with the Atlas Mnemosyne as well as with the cultural and institutional space of the Uffizi themselves.

In this seminar, the artist will discuss her work and her own mnemonic and photographic practices, based on the exploration of the materiality of photography through the use of the sculptural, performative, theatrical and the moving image.

Further information on the artist: https://www.lebohangkganye.co.za/