LEBOHANG KGANYE Exploring the relationship between memory, fantasy and family history

LEBOHANG KGANYE

The visual artist exploring the narratives and relationships between memory, fantasy and family history

Johannesburg-based visual artist Lebohang Kganye uses her work to explore her relationship to family and history. Her practice also opens its audience up to their own connections to their past and their sense of belonging. “My journey seems to be a deep response to loss and mourning — not just of different individuals, but of history, language and oral culture,” Kganye says. “My work is about memory, fantasy, identity formation and performance, and provides a means for reconstructing my identity by reconnecting with family members (both alive and dead) and exposing a wider common history.” Through these investigations, Kganye refl ects on the fact that identity is as intangible as a photograph: a site for the performance of dreams and the projection of narratives that are embedded with half-truths, denials and hidden facts. “Photographs record history, but it is only a history imagined. I choose which part of the fantasy to take with me and claim as my story.”

Growing up in Joburg, Kganye, who now works in multiple mediums including fi lm and installation, started out in photography, though not on purpose. Her initial interest was in studying journalism, but after failing to get into Wits University she applied for a year-long photography programme at David Goldblatt’s renowned Market Photo Workshop in 2009, hoping to pass the time until she could reapply for journalism. Sometime during her studies, she found she had a talent for visual storytelling and ended up completing the Advanced Photography Programme three years later. “I got into photography without thinking about becoming an artist, per se. So I feel like it kind of just happened by itself. It’s something I never really chose — it chose me.”

Soon after her studies Kganye won the Tierney Fellowship Award, which led to one of her best-known series Ke Lefa Laka (2013). Created in response to the death of her mother, it is formed of two parts: Her-story and Heir-story. For Her-story, Kganye found old images of her mother, many of which were taken before Kganye herself was born, and recreated the scenes from these images with herself in her mother’s place — often also wearing the same clothes. She then superimposed that image of herself, somewhat like a ghost appearing half-visible, over the original photograph. “It became quite a therapeutic process, a renewed connection with her. It allowed for a certain mourning to happen and a celebration at the same time,” she explains.

The series also brought her closer to her sister and grandmother, who were involved in the creation of the images. Her sister stood behind the lens, ensuring that Kganye was perfectly recreating the original image with her body position and expression, while her grandmother told her who the other people in the photographs were, where they had been taken, and what occasion the pictures were capturing.

Kganye found herself refl ecting on the ability of a photograph to prompt mourning, denial and longing. This passing, melancholic state can be healing, but it brings to our attention our own transient lives. “We look at the person and see their life trajectory and the fact that no matter how alive they look, the photograph points at all our mortalities — that the essence of my mother that I identify in these photographs is, in fact, my essence, my constructions, my memories of this person whom I knew in only one capacity: namely, mother.”

Even the curation of the images begins to create its own kind of false narrative — things that are included, things that are omitted. Different threads appear to run through the images, but perhaps only because we want to put them there. Family photos, Kganye believes, are much more than the documentation of personal narratives.

They become prized possessions, representations of how we want our ‘family-ness’ to appear, and therefore are not the preservers of reality, but the eroders of it.

The second part of Ke Lefa Laka moves from a focus on her mother to her grandfather. Scenes are formed from cardboard cut-outs and Kganye still appears in the images, but this time in the costume of a grandfather. He was the fi rst person in the family to move from di’plaasing, which means ‘homelands’, in the Orange Free State to the city in Transvaal to fi nd work, with the rest of the family eventually following suit. “My grandfather represents the central patriarchal fi gure in the project. He 3 passed away before I was born but I grew up in his house in Joburg and everyone has stories about him,” she explains.

Through Heir-story Kganye traces these ancestral roots, which began as an investigation into the original spelling and origins of her family name. Her grandfather was Khanye, grandmother was Khanyi and her own surname is Kganye. The word, in its various spellings, means ‘light’ in Sotho and Zulu.

“While the project straddles generations of my mother’s family, it also resonates with the history of South Africa, in that my family was uprooted and resettled because of Apartheid laws and the amendment of Land Acts. These stories refl ect my family moving from place to place during the Apartheid era to fi nd refuge, and then creating temporary homes in those spaces. This had a direct impact on the identity of my family as a whole,” Kganye explains.

This story of displacement and migration, of searching for home or a sense of belonging, is a story that transcends the South African experience. It is a universal human preoccupation, especially in our present troubling times. “Because the work is often extremely personal, the process is meant to be a therapeutic one for me. I can only really hope that it allows for the same thing for the audience; that it resonates with them too.”

In 2014 Kganye was commissioned by the British Council to make a short fi lm to be shown in Scotland as part of a Mandela Day celebration, and so began her path to moving image and installation. She made an animated continuation of the Ke Lefa Laka series, entitled Pied Piper’s Voyage, and collaborated with musicians Auntie Flo and Esa Williams on the soundscape. “It allowed for the cardboard series to continue to exist and to continue to come to life, even though the cardboards themselves don’t exist anymore,” explains Kganye.

The more she researched her history, the more it became apparent that the very nature of family history remains a space of contradictions, a mixture of truth and fi ction, of memory and emotion. Through the use of silhouette cut-outs of family members and other props, her fi lms confront these confl icting stories, which are told in multiple ways, even by the same person. “For me they reveal that time can break apart and reconnect and not quite fi t back into one another.”

In the same vein, Kganye has begun presenting her work as interactive installations, for example experimenting with playing clips of interviews she collected with family members for Heir-story. This is another way of unpacking her

fascination with oral 4 history — the transfer of knowledge and memory through spoken stories, and the loss of these traditions in modern life.

Kganye’s latest work is titled Tell Tale, and forms six theatrical scenes. For this, she went deep into South Africa’s Karoo desert, spending weeks walking in the hot sun along the gravel roads of the small town Nieu Bethesda. She was introduced to many of the town’s inhabitants by a woman named Shawn Graaff, who works on the conservation of Owl House, the former residence of artist Helen Martins, which is now a museum. Amongst the inhabitants Kganye met was a beekeeper who makes cosmetic products in her backyard from beeswax, a violin-string maker using horse tails to make the strings, and a woman who translates South African writer Athol Fugard’s plays from English to Afrikaans. These encounters informed the creation of miniature theatre sets made from silhouette cut- outs of these characters.

“Tell Tale does not attest to being a docmentation of a people, but presents their personal narratives, which they share over a cup of tea, homemade ginger ale or the locally brewed beer. These prized possessions hearken back to a particular time but are also vehicles for a fantasy that allows for a momentary space to perform ideals of community,” the artist explains. “There is so

much that is unwritten in history. It is literally passed down from one generation to the next, and so is quite fl uid in that sense. I am interested in the stories that are told, and that is where a lot of our history lies.” Kganye is now represented by Afronova in South Africa and has been widely recognised internationally. She has participated in major exhibitions and art fairs in Milan, Marrakesh, Tokyo and London and her work forms part of The Walther Collection in New York, The Pigozzi Collection in Geneva and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. She has also received a slew of commendations including the Jury Prize at the Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography in 2015, the CAP Prize 2016 in Basel, and the 2017 Sasol New Signatures Competition award. Despite all of her success, Kganye’s own story is only just beginning. “I’ve 5 never really considered myself a photographer because it involves all these other processes. So even though it starts with photography or ends with a photograph, I feel like the elements of collecting and research are really fulfi lling processes. My practice is pretty experimental, I’m looking forward to what the next stage of my work will look like.”

1 Re palame tereneng e fosahetseng, 2016. 2 O emetse mohala, 2016. 3 Kwana borayeng Phadima II, 2013. 4 Tshimong ka hara toropo II, 2013. 5 Habo Patience ka bokhathe II, 2013. 6 Re shapa setepe sa lenyalo II, 2013. 7 Re tantshetsa phaposing ya sekolo II, 2013. All images copyright Lebohang Kganye, courtesy AFRONOVA Gallery.