© Lebohang Kganye, 'Mohlokomedi wa Tora', Installation view (Kunsthal KAdE, 2018)
Lebohang Kganye grew up in South Africa, Johannesburg. She was first exposed to poetry and performance rather than visual arts, and that was really how she started to approach a creative career. Her interest in African literature led then to write stories and move early steps until she ended up using other media as photography. She first studied at the Market Photo Workshop an education institute that collaborates with quite a wide range of trainers that bring in different skills within a less theoretical environment. «It's rather more about a dialogue and finding your voice in terms of whatever you are trying to say through your practice,» she explains. Lebohang Kganye decided then to continue her studies, and she is currently doing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg.
© Lebohang Kganye, 'Dipale tsa bonna di fetolwa', from the series 'Dirithi', 2016
Her research focuses on horal histories in connection with photography and primarily through family albums. Something in her interest in the study of language and oral traditions leads back to philology. Philology (in ancient Greek: φιλoλογία, philologhía ("interest in the word"), composed of φίλος, phìlos, "lover, friend" and λόγος, lògos, "word, speech"), according to the current ordinary meaning, is a set of disciplines that studies texts of various kinds (literary, historical, political, economic, legal, etc.). As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, it is an art, a "goldsmith's expertise" of the word. Therefore, philology does not identify a field of investigation but a method. And I seem to catch inLebohang Kganye's particular attention, the traces of this ancient and slow approach, which takes us into the depth of language. There is an echo of a sartorial discipline in her words: «the practice of naming a child as a way to preserve family history.»
© Lebohang Kganye, 'Pied Piper's Voyage', Animated Film, 2014 (Music by Auntie Flo and Esa Williams. 3 min 26 sec Film Still 3)
© Lebohang Kganye, 'Pied Piper's Voyage', Animated Film, 2014 (Music by Auntie Flo and Esa Williams. 3 min 26 sec Film Still 5)
© Lebohang Kganye, 'Pied Piper's Voyage', Animated Film, 2014 (Music by Auntie Flo and Esa Williams. 3 min 26 sec Film Still 6)
«I prefer to call myself a storyteller,» she adds, as more than anything, Lebohang Kganye wanted to be a writer, so she found a way to incorporate that interest in storytelling in her practice. Her research is a crossroads of mediums, which intersect to express a polysemantic vocation. Like collecting family stories then reenacted, as a theatre piece or a set design. The exhibition 'Pass It On. Private Stories, Public Histories' at FOTODOK, which looks mainly at archives, gave her a chance to reinterpret family stories and stage them for the public. An oral subject that becomes three-dimensional, concrete, a sort of installation. Images are scanned, printed on cardboard, and then moving in the space. «They came to life.»
© Installation view, exhibition 'PASS IT ON. PRIVATE STORIES, PUBLIC HISTORIES, at FOTODOK, Utrecht, 2020 © Studio Hans Wilschut
© Installation view, exhibition 'PASS IT ON. PRIVATE STORIES, PUBLIC HISTORIES, at FOTODOK, Utrecht, 2020 © Studio Hans Wilschut
© Installation view, exhibition 'PASS IT ON. PRIVATE STORIES, PUBLIC HISTORIES, at FOTODOK, Utrecht, 2020 © Studio Hans Wilschut
'Reconstruction of a family' is a body of work produced in 2016, looks at her family history and the possibility itself to represent a family story. So she took over the stories told by her grandfather and how he used to take the train to move from the city to the farmlands. And that day when with her daughter (Lebohang's aunt)... Words are like images, which become silhouettes, and settings, like a train station, and then again a train which moves into the scene and through lights takes further the idea of spacing, of imagination. Oral stories become theatre. I try to imagine from the photos of the installation, and from Lebohang Kganye's words, the unique experience that this theatrical staging could have provoked in me. It's not easy. But after having attended many exhibitions in the past years, I can manage to understand the technical scene, the work of many people around this singular craft stage. A moment visualized in Lebohang's mind taking a definite shape thousands of miles away. And luckily to inspire many other people.
© Lebohang Kganye, 'Re palame tereneng e fosahetseng', from the series 'Reconstruction of a Family', 2016
© Lebohang Kganye, 'O itse ke tlamehile ho mo kuta manala', from the series 'Reconstruction of a Family', 2016
© Lebohang Kganye, 'O robetse a ntse a bala Bona', from the series 'Reconstruction of a Family', 2016
The development of general linguistic theories helped to clarify the individual-community relationship and illuminated the concept of popular. «The distinction established by Ferdinand de Saussure between word, understood as individual expression, and language, as a social fact, was applied to popular literature by P. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson in the essay Die Folk-Lore als eine besusione Form des Schaffens (1929). They have shown that similar to what happens for the passage from speech to language, the community itself can assimilate the community's creations or innovations. Thus, it becomes a tradition, with a process of choice and elimination, which is not a passive mechanism but a creative activity.»
Just as writing has reinvented the sung word, today we see Lebohang Kganye's images "giving new life" to family stories. And this way, paraphrasing the poet Mark Strand, Lebohang gives the human being something that he cannot do without; she transfers us from a cognitive thought to an affective thought; that is, she reminds us what it means to feel alive.
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