Talk on Memory and Photography
Following Lebohang Kganye’s exhibition, Ternary Memories of Yesterday, Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark hosted a seminar which focused on the works in the exhibition as well as on the individual practices of Kganye and Haarløv Johnsen. Speakers were Lebogang Kganye, Ditte Haarløv Johnsen and John Fleetwood, moderated by Asta Nyyssonen. They explored a range of topics, including the limitations and possibilities of documentary photography, speculative histories, post-colonial and feminist approaches, as well as how art can be used to illuminate stories that have not previously been told or documented. This seminar took place on 6 May 2023.
©Lebohang Kganye. Woman in the middle of the night, 2022
©Ditte Haarløv Johnsen. View from Gonçalos Place, 2012
About the exhibition
Lebohang Kganye's (ZA) solo exhibition Ternary Memories of Yesterday showcases recent works that engage with alternative and reimagined narrative spaces, where contemporary struggles, alternative timelines and the artist's own family history intertwine through a mix of photography, installation and animation. Kganye has an artistic background in photography, which her practice revolves around. Although the exhibition does not contain traditionally photographic works, they all make use of the materiality of photography, presenting archival images in animated videos or original photographs printed out and staged in a series of diorama installations.
In the series Keep the Light Faithfully Lebohang Kganye reimagines depictions from Western literature of the often unknown and gendered narratives of the hundreds of female lighthouse keepers who worked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although there is no historical evidence of female lighthouse keepers in South Africa, Kganye weaves the female lightkeepers of literary history into the works. Each work is based on conversations with seven lighthouse keepers, some of whom are still in service, who live in some of the most isolated parts of South Africa along the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape coastlines. Lebohang Kganye translates these oral histories into small, contained worlds by staging inkjet cutouts that consist of small set pieces with the potential to be moved, giving the viewer a space in which to imagine,
The exhibition also includes two animated film works, Shadows of Re-Memory and Ke Sale Teng. In Ke Sale Teng, Kganye makes use of archival images from his own family's photo albums, and explores how this medium can be used to construct a partially fictional representation of a family history through what is left out of the narrative. In Shadows of Re-Memory, Kganye also stages a narrative with a factual starting point. The video consists of animated scenes imagined by the artist, all based on stories collected from the residents of the village of Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo of the Eastern Cape. The result is an exhibition that, by combining imagination, oral storytelling and documented events, challenges accepted narratives, whether they are presented to us through literature, history books or our own family albums.
The exhibition opened on 4 May 2023. The seminar and the exhibition are supported by the Statens Kunstfond, the Augustinusfonden, the Louis Hansen Foundation and the Obelske Familiefond
Ditte Haarløv Johnsen(b.1977) is a Danish photographer who grew up in Mozambique and today lives and works in Copenhagen. She has studied photography both in Mozambique, Denmark and Canada, and has since trained as a documentary film director (2007). Her films and photographs revolve around the same themes: the identity of the individual, life on the edge of society and the fight for the right to exist. She has received numerous awards for her work and her works have been around the world: from Syria to Canada, from Finland to Johannesburg. www.dihajo.com .
Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990) is a South African artist born and living in Johannesburg. She trained at Market Photo Workshop and the University of Johannesburg and is currently pursuing an MFA at Witwatersrand University. Kganye represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale 2022 and has exhibited globally in Africa, Europe and the U.S. She is primarily a photographer, but her interest in the materiality of photography is persistent and is explored in countless ways through her use of the sculptural, performative, theatrical and the moving image. Her exhibition Haufi nyana? I've come to take you home is currently on display at the Foam Museum in Amsterdam and she is the 16th winner of their prestigious Foam Paul Huf Award.
https://www.lebohangkganye.co.za/
John Fleetwood(b. 1970) is a South African curator and educator. He is the director of Photo:, a platform based in Johannesburg, which develops and promotes socially relevant photography projects, and is the co-head of BA photography at the Royal College of Art, The Hague (KABK), the Netherlands. From 2002-2015 Fleetwood was director of the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg. He is the founder of the Centers of Learning for Photography in Africa (CLPA). Recently, he has curated 'Intimacy and Resistance: An intergenerational dialogue on South African photobooks', for Photobook Week Aarhus (Denmark 2020), 'Five Photographers: A tribute to David Goldblatt' (incl. Johannesburg, Bamako, Maputo, Durban, 2018 -2019) and 'Of traps and tropes' as part of the Kerkennah International Photography Festival (Tunisia, 2018). In 2017, he was guest editor for Aperture's Platform Africa edition. www.phototool.co.za