The memory of photography

Mmoloki wa mehopolo: Breaking Bread with a Wanderer is a solo exhibition of work by Johannesburg-based visual artist and photographer Lebohang Kganye and also marks the opening of Brundyn Arts & Culture. This will be Kganye’s first solo presentation in Cape Town and it showcases work from five projects produced over the past decade. The show will be on until 15 October. Kganye’s work forms part of several private and public collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris, and the Getty Museum. 

Through photography, sculpture, performance, installation and film, Kganye explores what she calls “fictional history”, merging material and characters from her family archive with resonant elements from theatre and literature to create profound and moving scenarios based on real or imagined oral and collective histories.

“I studied photography, but my first love has always been words and literature and so that is a huge influence in my work, as you’ll see in one of the films that is on exhibition — Shadows of a Memory — which was inspired by the work of Athol Fugard,” says Kganye.

The artist — who over the past ten years has exhibited her work extensively, including at the SA Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 — forms a new generation of contemporary SA photographers. Primarily known for her photography, Kganye often incorporates the archival and performative into a practice that centres storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience.

“I feel like photography chose me in a sense because I always knew that I loved stories and storytelling, but I didn’t know that I could study African literature; and because I knew I loved writing I thought that I’d apply and study journalism. In preparation for one of our final comprehension tests in Grade 12, we were given old papers. One of the old comprehension papers was titled The Life and Death of photojournalist Kevin Carter. This was my introduction to the term photojournalism. When I didn’t get accepted into my journalism course my mother suggested I study a photography short course and I fell in love.”

Her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in a myriad of ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative and the moving image.“For instance my work on theatre director Athol Fugard was inspired by reading some of the scripts and experiencing his plays and from doing a short residency in New Bethesda, which is where he’d written most of his work, and then interviewing residents to get a sense of who Athol Fugard was, and also to find out about some of the characters that he had written about. So oral history is a huge part of how I work, interviewing people and hearing their stories and memories and really working with memory.”

Kganye believes oral history is an important African historical instrument because during her Masters research at Wits University, her investigations revealed that for many Africans of a certain generation, there is a history of misspellings on official documents and incorrect birth data, and often the correct information would be passed on orally, “So a large part of my research looks at the official history versus the oral history. And this has consumed a large part of my Masters Research at Wits.”

Looking forward Kganye would love to see policymakers who understand what the arts are about. “There are so many artists in the arts and culture space who have PhDs and are super knowledgeable about arts and culture and for me that’s one of the biggest loopholes when we look at policy-making at government level. “There has to be a consultation and dialogue between government, practitioners and people in academia to really accelerate that portfolio. I’m hopeful that during my lifetime there will be a change in the perception around the arts and that the next generation will be given the support structures to pursue it.”