BRUSSELS.- 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 major solo exhibition in Brussels and at the gallery.

Concurrently, the gallery will present a solo stand devoted to Kganye at Art Brussels from April 24-27. The show will present large scale fabric-based works from the series Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-24).

During the exhibition opening on April 23rd, Kganye will be in dialogue with Renée Mussai, London-based curator, writer and scholar of visual culture with a special interest in Black feminist practices.

LEBOHANG KGANYE. THE WORK OF SHADOWS

The exhibition features four major bodies of work from Lebohang Kganye’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.

Kganye is a pioneering contemporary artist, part of a new generation of South African artists working with image based techniques. She came up through the renowned Market Photo Workshop founded by David Goldblatt and her works have been exhibited in the traveling show dedicated to the artist at the Art Institute of Chicago (2024) and Yale University Art Gallery (2025). With her work with family portraiture and photo albums she builds on the legacy of Santu Mofokeng. Her use of self portraiture to explore questions of identity builds on the work of Zanele Muholi and other artists who use themselves as a vehicle to explore sociological, political and emotional questions. Yet Kganye takes all of these references and art historical threads into new territories with her use of critical fabulation, as Saidiya Hartman theorized, in which she layers deep historical research with imagination and fiction. In her earlier series Ke Lefa Laka : Herstory (2013) the artist inserted herself into vintage photographs of her mother; in Keep The Light Faithfully (2022) she embodies the layered semi-fictional historical character of a female lighthouse keeper, a melange of real oral histories from the few remaining men working in the field and historical research into women who filled the roles in other contexts. Her use of cutouts, layering and dioramas references both theater, with a nod to William Kentridge, as well as children’s pop-up books in works that are at once poetic, sculptural, and inviting, while engaging major historical and personal themes of decolonization, migration and family.

The artist uses a myriad of techniques that bring photographic practice into new realms and her contributions to the field are well noted. Kganye is featured in MoMA New Photography 2025 opening in September, and is the winner of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize (2024) for her 2023 solo exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam. The artist has recently exhibited in the traveling exhibition A World In Common: New African Photography at TATE (2024), at the Barnes Foundation in a two person show with Sue Williamson (2023), and many others. Her earliest work is concurrently on view in the exhibition A Partir d’elle, Artists and Their Mother at Fondation A Stichting in Brussels through May 25.

A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023)

A 22 panel, panoramic film installation, A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023) fills the nave with a video merging images of the artist trekking across Cameroon with animated drawings set to a sonorous natural soundtrack.

The starting point of Lebohang Kganye’s archival enquiry for the work were images and drawings by the German painter and photographer Marie Pauline Thorbecke, who in 1911–1913 undertook an expedition to Cameroon for a publication by her husband, the geographer Franz Thorbecke on behalf of the German Colonial Society.

In December 2022, Kganye set out on a trek across Cameroon, retracing the trail of the so-called Colonial Expedition of 1911 that the Thorbeckes had embarked on 110 years prior.

While the Thorbecke couple undertook the journey to appropriate objects and photograph people and this vast land for the purposes of imperial extraction, Kganye set out to symbolically return the objects and images she encountered in the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s collections that she had studied during a residency in Cologne. The luggage she carries along the journey symbolizes the burden of colonial heritage.

Considering the conquest of black geographies as central to the colonial undertaking, she questions both the ownership and restitution of land and objects as an epic undertaking.

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.

Lebohang Kganye

Lebohang Kganye is featured in MoMA New Photography 2025 and the 2025 laureate of the Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography (ICP). She is the recipient of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize, 2024 for her exhibition Haufi Nyana? I’ve Come to Take you Home, which took place at Foam, Amsterdam (2023). Other notable recent awards include the Foam Paul Huf Award, 2022, Grand Prix Images Vevey, 2021/22; and Camera Austria Award, 2019.

The artist has recently exhibited at TATE, The Barnes Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, and others. In 2022, Kganye was one of three artists exhibited in Into the Light, the South African Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Kganye’s work is held in public collections including the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Victoria and Albert Museum, Verbund Collection, Walther Collection, and Carnegie Art Museum, among others.