Lebohang Kganye

Known for her sensitive exploration of personal and familial history, Lebohang Kganye’s series Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story (‘it’s my legacy’ in Sesotho, Kganye’s native language) represents the artist’s experience with grief over the loss of her late mother. She explains: “Eight years ago I lost my mother and I needed to explore the possibility of keeping a connection with her. I found many photos and clothes which had always been there but that I had ignored over the years. That’s when the idea of ‘the ghost’ started to emerge in my work: a presence that isn’t; one which Roland Barthes speaks about in his Camera Lucida.” In the book, he considers various photographs from his family album as he searches for a likeness that can represent his feelings for and memory of his mother. She continues: “My reconnection with my mother became a visual manipulation of ‘her-our’ histories. I began inserting myself into her pictorial narrative by emulating these snaps of her from my family album. I would dress in the exact clothes that she was wearing in these thirty-year-old photographs and mimic the poses. This was my way of marrying the two memories (mine and of my mother). I later developed digital photomontages where I juxtaposed old photographs retrieved from the family archives with this ‘present version of her -me-, to reconstruct a new story and a commonality. I realised I was scared to forget what my mother looked like, what she sounded like, and her defining gestures. The photomontages became a substitute for the paucity of memory, a forged identification and imagined conversation.”