Lebohang Kganye

Lebohang Kganye (born 1990)is a South African visual artist and photographer. Quote Its funny,I was with my gran when you called earlier and she was raising this same thing with me-that the ancestors who i spoke with in the work are blessing me. He passed on the years before i was born,but so many of the stories are about him.He moved to Joburg first, but the rest of the family would come and stay at his Katlehong when they moved to the city. I started this journey in 2012. I guess I felt my mother was my only link to my family. When she died, I felt I had lost that identity.So i began travelling to locate my family and the stories of our history. . I am concerned with what photography has been used to represent across the continent, but especially in South Africa. I was making work about a period that I never lived in, one involving the collective memory of many family members who had shared their stories with me. . In my practice, photography is used as a way to recreate moments that I have never myself experienced. In a similar way to figures and objects in a dollhouse, each element in Search for Memory creates the illusion of an entire world. They look like they could be moved, changed or shifted. I wish to emphasise the fabricated nature of history and memory, how the visualisation of an event always induces an element of creation, experimentation and error, an on-going construction. In Search for Memory allows me to make historical adjustments, by placing my family members at the centre of a national stage. 4 The work refers to apartheid, an era that’s behind us. But it also speaks to the present that is very much impacted by apartheid. Everything that is now, the economy, black families living in townships, white people in suburban areas, is a result of the past. So the series also talks about current issues in South Africa, such as land. There have been quite a lot of debates around the redistribution of land. In the work I talk about my family who stayed on a farm for so many years but had no claim to it. And then they came to the city and moved to the townships because that’s just where black people had to live. That doesn’t make sense. As I was working on the series the word ‘ghost’ kept coming up. Initially it was about the (deceased) family members being ghosts but later on I realized I was the ghost, because I am the one who was forcing myself into their history, into a place and an era that I’ve not been a part of. I put myself in a story that I don’t belong in and that I can’t claim but I’m conscious of my presence there anyway. 5 This idea of the imaginary within memory for me is really important The reality is that historical documents or other seemingly factual sources are more often than not one-sided. If we are to resist erasure, we must always allow space for the organic. Lebohang Kganye: In Search of Light 28 January 2023 External links Category:1990 births Category: Living people Category:People from South Africa