Lebohang Kganye was announced as the 2024 winner of the prestigious £30,000 prize at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, on Thursday 16 May 2024. The artist was awarded the Prize for the exhibition “Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home” at Foam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (17 February – 21 May 2023).

The influential prize which is presented annually, rewards artists and their projects recognized as having made the most significant contribution to international contemporary photography over the past 12 months.

In her vast, experimental installations, Kganye creates a space that resides between memory and fantasy. Here she collects stories from her family with excerpts from South African literature, and rewrites them into theatrical scripts. Silhouettes, cut-outs, puppets, shadows and ghosts, fashioned from material found in photo albums as well as her own compositions, (re-)enact these scripts and bring them to life. The exhibition features four projects which use a complex array of media – from photographic montages in “Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story” (“It’s my inheritance: Her-Story”, 2013) to spatial installation in “Mohlokomediwa Tora” (“Lighthouse Keeper”, 2018), and film animation in “Shadows of Re-Memory” (2021) to patchwork in “Mosebetsi wa Dirithi” (“The Work of Shadows”, 2022).

The exhibition’s title, “Haufi nyana?” meaning “too close?” in Sesotho, one of South Africa’s official languages, reflects the dialogue between the viewer and the artist. It touches on notions of home as heritage and identity, as well as physical and mental spaces. Her skilful blending of images and words allows her to navigate the complexity of the South African experience, opening new ways of understanding and contributing to the process of decolonisation.