LeboHang Kganye: An ever-expanding process of self-imagining
Lebohang Kganye’s latest exhibition at the Boschendal x Brundyn Gallery on Boschendal Estate invites audiences to explore an interactive journey of discovery. The exhibition includes a preview of The Sea is History, comprising four large-scale pop-up sculptures, and a solo exhibition entitled Mmoloki wa Mehopolo: Breaking Bread with a Wanderer — showcasing the Johannesburg-based artist’s ability to work with photography beyond two dimensions.
Radically redefining the medium through an approach that emphasises materiality, Kganye explores themes of heritage, migration, and family archives through conceptual juxtapositions between light and shadow, memory and history, and alternating scales of work. Notably, her approach completely reinvents photography in three-dimensional forms that allow viewers to physically interact with photo-sculptures that bridge the gap between the tangible and intangible realms of memory and narrative, venturing into theatre and literature to pursue a process of self-knowing.
Through these dioramas and life-size pop-up sculptures, Kganye stages an experience through the careful arrangement of objects and sentiments that explore memory as something unpredictable. The milieu in which her work exists represents a real-life setting, both in scale and in the capricious nature of remembering, a force majeure of Kganye’s disruption of memory and photography.
The opening of this exhibition coincided with the start of Cape Town Art Week, although it offers a unique and immersive experience out of the city centre, which perhaps provokes a more contemplative and ethereal appreciation away from the fairgrounds. That being said, Brundyn Arts & Culture on Boschendal Estate lends itself as the perfect location for Kganye’s latest oeuvre — an artistic exploration that transcends conventional boundaries in more ways than one.
