La Patinoire Royale Bach’s museum-like nave will be filled with Lebohang Kganye’s large scale image-based installations in The Work of Shadows, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Concurrently, the gallery will present a solo stand devoted to the artist at Art Brussels from April 24-27. Kganye’s exploration of memory also extends into her C& edition Messages from the Memory Palace (2021), reflecting her layered approach to storytelling. A few editions are still available—contact editions@contemporaryand.com

The exhibition features four major bodies of work from the artist’s recent practice. A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023) is a massive, immersive 22-panel video installation the artist made in Cameroun as she followed a colonial era expedition in reverse: symbolically returning objects that had been extracted. Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-2024) are large-scale textile works that feature monumental scale portraits of the artist’s family members. Keep the Light Faithfully (2022) is a series of diorama lightboxes with layered photographic cutouts of the artist reenacting stories she gathered from oral testimonies of South African lighthouse workers. Mohlokomedi wa Tora (2018) is a large-scale circular installation that brings together four scenes from different parts of the artist’s family tree, an exploration of migration, genealogy and light.

The South African artist, (b. 1990) works with expanded photography, video and mixed media to create deeply researched works that layer historiography, theatricality, autobiography and poetics in often sculptural installations. The artist’s name is etymologically linked to the Sotho word for light kganya and bringing light and life to layered postcolonial histories is an animating thread in her practice.

Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-24)

Rooted in the artist’s fascination with the Black family photo album — one of the few ways during apartheid in which black South African people could document their lives themselves and build their own representation, in Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-24) Kganye extrapolates figures of family members from photo albums to create unique, life size, textile based works.

Kganye singles the figures out and separates them from the context of group pictures, studio floral backdrops or outdoor views so we see individuals in their monumental, immortalized presence, floating in negative space. When brought together within the walls of the room, these cotton twill cut-out stitched collages constitute a gallery of honor, the collective selves of Kganye’s extended family that, stitch by stitch, patch up parts of the artist’s autobiography. Mosebetsi wa Dirithi translates as the work of shadows from Sesotho.

Keep the Light Faithfully (2022)

In Keep the Light Faithfully (2022), Lebohang Kganye layers oral testimonies with critical fabulation to imagine new histories. She collected the accounts of the few surviving lighthouse keepers still working in South Africa, gathering their memories of both adventure and monotony. She searched for female lighthouse keepers, after having read of women in the profession in literature, but she found no trace of women in the industry in South Africa. So she created a character and inserted herself into the history. Each work brings to life a true tale from the lighthouse keeper’s stories, but altered slightly with the artist playing a central role.
The works implement the act of cutting, folding, pasting and assembling. These moveable paper elements of cardboard cut-outs create the illusion of a theater set and proposes photography both as practice and object. Each cut-out creates the illusion of an entire world – they look like they could be moved, changed or shifted. The work emphasizes the fabricated nature of history and memory: how the visualization of an event always induces an element of creation, experimentation and error; an on-going construction.

Mohlokomedi wa Tora (2018)
In Mohlokomedi wa Tora (2018), a circular installation features life-size cutouts of photographs of the artist’s family in domestic scenes. Lit in a circular, cyclical pattern, a spinning light at the center of the installation creates the feeling of an inverse zoetrope that recreates images non- stop through casting low-light long shadows — when one is standing in the installation people become giants.

Kganye’s research began with an interrogation of the etymology of her family name which means light. Each side of the installation speaks of a breakage in the light, a new extension to the root of the name. The audience may enter the installation at one of four passages; the inlets are the four strands or groupings of the Khanye family. The work speaks to the process of migration and touches on the subject of genealogy, which transformed family structures and networks in and around southern Africa.

The word mohlokomedi suggests an individual’s vocation of caretaker and tending to the light by polishing the surface like the stoeps in township homes, referencing the artist’s grandmother who worked as a maid. The arrangement of the installation is reminiscent of the narrow streets of the township in Katlehong, and at bird’s eye view the fortress-like structure of township planning is at play.

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