THABISO SEKGALA (1981-2014)

Thabiso Sekgala was born in Soweto in 1981.

He studied photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and participated in various photography master classes. He was awarded a Tierney Fellowship 2010; received an honorable mention in the Ernest Cole Award and was nominated for the Paul Huff Award in 2011. In 2013 he had residencies in both the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and at HIWAR/Durant Al Funun, Jordan.

In his first major project, “Homeland”, Sekgala explored this artificially created space, regarding it both as a home, as lived reality, as the land of the ancestors, and as an uninhabitable, risk-laden or forlorn space whose every-day, obviously contemporary reality is so captured by history. His images refer to the persistent violence of unequal land distribution and of the legacy of the Apartheid system that still determines the present. Sekgala’s photographs interweave questions about the right of assembly and the freedom of public expression with popular and aesthetical interests.

Thabiso Sekgala died on October 15, 2014.