Kemang Wa Lehulere’s inaugural exhibition, History will Break your Heart, opens at the Iziko South African National Gallery on 19 November. Wa Lehulere is the 2015 winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art.

Kemang Wa Lehulere’s work finds its form in several media, including installation, text, video, drawing and performance. His work engages with the spaces between personal narrative and collective history, between processes of amnesia and archive, all the while transitioning between a dream state and an insomnious reality.

History will Break your Heart is an exhibition that takes its cue from the work of Gladys Mgudlandlu, Ernest Mancoba, RRR Dlomo and Nat Nakasa. Looking at these deceased South African-born artists and writers, Wa Lehulere creates a fractured narrative in an attempt to recall past moments, artworks and literature as a way of rethinking the present. Employing strategies of re-enactment, the exhibition consists of Mgudlandu’s and Mancoba’s work in relation to Wa Lehulere’s.

For exhibition enquiries, contact curator, Ernestine White on Tel. 021 467 7234 or email ewhite@iziko.org.za

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