Lebohang Kganye

Kganye's practice centres on photography while extending into film, sculpture, and installation. The artist's family name is derived from the Sotho word ‘kganya’, meaning "light" – an apt metaphor for a practice that reveals the layered personal and postcolonial histories carried within images, objects, and inherited narratives.

Photography functions as a generative threshold in Kganye's work: a medium through which memory, fiction, and lived experience converge. Through staged re-performance, she inserts herself into archival images and inhabits inherited narratives, foregrounding the instability of memory and the imaginative labour required to recover histories shaped by erasure, displacement, and misnaming. These investigations extend beyond the photographic image into sculptural and architectural forms, including cardboard cut-outs, aluminium prints mounted on steel frames, motorised tableaux, and immersive dioramas.

Kganye has been recognised internationally through major museum exhibitions, awards, and public collections. In 2025, she was featured in New Photography 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, following her receipt of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2024 for her solo exhibition Haufi Nyana? I've Come to Take You Home at Foam, Amsterdam. She has also received the ICP Infinity Award (2025), the Foam Paul Huf Award (2022), the Grand Prix Images Vevey (2021/22), and the Camera Austria Award (2019). Recent institutional exhibitions include Fotomuseum Antwerp, Le BAL, the Albertina Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and Tate Modern. In 2022, Kganye represented South Africa in the South African Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others.

Kganye's first solo exhibition with Southern Guild will open in Cape Town in February 2027.