Ke Lefa Laka / Her Story

Although primarily a photographer, Kganye often incorporates her interest in sculpture, performance, installation and film.
The loss of her mother, and the only link with her extended family, in 2010, triggered in Lebohang Kganye the fundamental need to trace her ancestral roots. She found many photos and clothes which had always been there but which she had ignored over the years. The idea of “the ghost” started to emerge in her work. Her reconnection with her mother became a visual manipulation of “herour’ histories”. Kganye began inserting herself into her pictorial narrative by emulating these snaps of her from my family album; her way of marrying the two memories.
The photomontages became a substitute for the paucity of memory, a forged identification and imagined conversation. She confronts her collected and altered photographs; the artist’s and her family’s, as material for both memory and fantasy. She explores fictional history by using archives to merge illusive characters with “real” characters in a new universe.

Kganye was awarded the Jury Prize at the Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography in 2015 and the CAP Prize 2016 in Basel and more recently the Camera Austria Award for the 2019 Artist of the Year. She has participated in major exhibitions internationally, including The Prada Foundation in Milan, MACAAL in Marrakesh, Digital Africa in Tokyo or Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town.
Kganye’s work forms part of prestigious collections, such as the Walther Collection New York or The Pigozzi Collection Geneva.

AFRONOVA

Afronova Gallery, based in Johannesburg, is the brainchild of the dynamic duo Emilie Demon and Henri Vergon who are developing and consolidating an innovative model of gallery together with some of the most progressive and influential artists in South Africa and the
Southern Hemisphere. For twenty years, they have been nurturing relationships with a Pan-African and international network of likeminded curators, institutions, critics, private foundations and collectors.

Afronova Gallery, 70, 8th Street Parkhurst 2193 — Johannesburg, South Africa

www.afronova.com