Lebohang Kganye Stages a Challenge to Colonialism

South African artist Lebohang Kganye collects children’s books. In their whimsy, she tells me, she finds the space of fantasy and, among other marvels, appreciates the way pop-up books construct themselves ex nihilo. In ‘The Work of Shadows’ – staged in the cavernous, late-19th-century former skating rink that now houses Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach – Kganye has not so much created a book as deconstructed and harnessed its parts – narrative, character, image, materiality – in order to proffer a delicate personal take on theatre, portraiture and colonial politics. 

With the four, free-standing, life-size dioramas of Mohlokomedi wa Tora (Lighthouse Keepers, 2018) –  tableaux evoking her family’s forced migration from the countryside to the city during apartheid – Kganye has fashioned a shadow theatre of memory. In the centre of the gallery space, the installations of photographic prints on wood depict scenes reconstructed from family lore and photo albums. Explicitly naive in their ad hoc construction, these card and wood ‘cut-outs’ remind us of the inherent theatricality of image-making. Characters from family stories – the 16 cows of Kganye’s aunt’s dowry, for instance – are rendered in a hodgepodge of sizes, perspectives askew. These slight gaps in verisimilitude reveal the effort and artifice of such staging, mirroring the factual slippages of storytelling and the intricate construction of narrative: flimsy yet made ‘real’ through our willingness to suspend disbelief. Like cracks, these unresolved zones are where the light seeps in, provoking reflection on memory’s relationship to fiction.  

The artist is embodied and kinetic in other ways, her body acting as a vessel as she moves from image-object to performance. In the nine-minute, 22-panel, immersive video installation A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023) – originally commissioned by the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne – Kganye is a presence within each frame. Here, the artist looks beyond her family lineage and native country to engage instead with early-20th-century archival records documenting a colonial expedition in Cameroon, undertaken more than a century ago by German photographer and artist Marie Pauline Thorbecke and her geographer husband, Franz.

As the live-action version of Kganye moves through the video, Thorbecke’s colonial-era, pen-drawing panoramas – almost entirely devoid of humans – become moving images, like photographs emerging in a developing bath. A Burden Consumed in Sips is both a journey of restitution and an exercise in alchemy: territory depicted as empty land – an invitation to plunder – comes to life in Kganye’s video, as the artist warms herself by a fire, inhabits a shelter and pours soil from her hands back onto the ground. Throughout this wordless film, we hear the artist grunting – reminding us that the acts of restoration and repair are a collective process, the burden not hers alone to shoulder but something in which we all must share. 

An interest in collective memory underpins the other two series on display. Family photo albums and documentary journalism infuse ‘Mosebetsi wa Dirithi’ (The Work of Shadows, 2023–24), large-scale textile works that suspend family portraits made with shimmering fabrics and threads. ‘Keep the Light Faithfully’ (2022), meanwhile, is a series of diorama light boxes based on fictional scenes featuring female South African lighthouse keepers – imaginary figures who might have existed had women historically held such posts. 

Kganye’s labour is, as the exhibition title tells us, ‘the work of shadows’: grappling with and exhuming narratives from the past, be they stories from her own family or transnational histories of colonialism. In the obscurity of the gallery, dangers may seem to loom and our senses be distorted. But the province of shadows is also the realm of possibility – the recollection of a darkened womb, before history begins.  

Lebohang Kganye’s ‘The Work of Shadows’ is on view at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels, until 10 July 

^{Main image: Lebohang Kganye, Drowning Professor and Doctors (detail), 2022, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels}