Lebohang Kganye

Photography has always been used as a tool of evidence, but it is also a tool of imagination, giving memories and collective storytelling a visual form. Whether through words, photography, sculpture or oral history, Lebohang Kganye is, above all, a storyteller.

Le Sale ka Kgotso translates as “stay in peace” in Sesotho. It is a phrase of farewell, spoken when leaving someone’s home. But language carries multiple layers of meaning. When mispronounced as “le sale le Kgotso“, the phrase evokes not peace, but a tokoloshe: a mischievous and dangerous spirit from Xhosa and Zulu mythology, believed to cause illness, chaos, and spiritual disruption. Lebohang Kganye draws attention to this linguistic slippage, revealing how words – like homes and histories – can be double-edged. Just as with the architecture she constructs, Kganye shows that language itself can become a site of haunting. What appears as a gesture of goodwill may, in fact, invoke something far more menacing.

The exhibition invites visitors into a life-sized, walkable structure modeled after a “Reconstruction and Development Programme” (RDP) house – a South African socio-economic housing program implemented by the government of President Nelson Mandela post-apartheid in 1994 – transformed here into a spectral framework that is at once solid and fragile, filled with ruptures rather than resolution.

While deeply rooted in historical material, Kganye’s work is never nostalgic. It speaks to the unresolved present: political, uncanny, and deeply intimate all at once. It refuses closure and allows myth and memory to coexist without hierarchy. With Le Sale ka Kgotso, she creates a haunted home built from aluminum and steel, deliberately blurring fact and fiction, and using familial memory as a lens through which national myth is examined – and scrutinized.

CREDITS

This exhibition is curated by Marina Paulenka, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska Berlin and coordinated by Jessica Jarl, Global Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska.