Lebohang Kganye

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, on view from 12 September 2025 to 25 January 2026, 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