The South African artist and photographer Lebohang Kganye was selected in 2022 as the winner of the 16thedition of the Foam Paul Huf Award. The jury team, comprised by five curators and experts, was struck by her ambitious and complex approach to the medium: ‘’Lebohang Kganye uses photography as a medium to imagine and depict a new history.”
In this Fotokroniek Talk we will get a closer look into Kganye’s visual language and how it came to be. We will explore how her work developed alongside her interest on her family history and how this source of inspiration has led her to explore a diverse range of mediums: from performance to stage designs and embroidery. Wishing to provide an overview of her last decade of work, this Fotokroniek will present a nice introduction to her upcoming show at Foam: Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home (February 17 to May 21).
About Lebohang Kganye
Lebohang Kganye (1990) forms a new generation of contemporary South African visual artists. Although primarily a photographer, her ongoing interest in the materiality of photography is explored in myriad ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative, theatrical and the moving image. While her work may resonate with a particularly South African experience, it critically engages with oral tradition as form and memory, as a tangible source material.
Lebohang Kganye received her introduction to photography at the Market Photo Workshop, in Johannesburg, in 2009 and completed the Advanced Photography Programme in 2011. She obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2014 and is currently doing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University, South Africa. Notable recent awards include the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/22, Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, 2020, Camera Austria Award, 2019 and the finalist of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative, 2019. Kganye’s work forms part of several private and public collec-tions, including the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the Walther Collection in Ulm.
