Lebohang Kganye rose up through South Africa’s influential Market Photo Workshop but today, this globally celebrated artist is far from tied to a 2D take on photography. Indicative of how she moves seamlessly through different visual mediums, her current solo exhibition, ‘The Work of Shadows’ at a Patinoire Royale Bach in Brussels, features large-scale textile works, a monumental video set across 22 screens and a large-scale wooden sculptural installation as well as a series of mesmeric dioramas.

Following a stellar year of achievements - Kganye is the 2025 laureate of the Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography, the recipient of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize 2024, and will next feature in MoMA’s New Photography 2025 – this show is a glorious bringing together of four major bodies of work. Here’s what she has to tell us about each of them.

Mohlokomedi wa Tora (2018)

“I always play with this idea of photography's relationship to both memory and the imaginary. And this work is about me imagining my family’s memories – stories from a time before I was born and some featuring characters that I never met,” Kganye says of the installation made up of life-size photographs of her family in domestic scenes. “It’s very much our journeys as people but also how family structures were influenced or changed by migration, as well as how family identities and languages were erased through migration, colonisation and apartheid.”

Of her low-lit circular structures, she adds: “Working with large installation cut-outs had a lot to do with my interest in the similarities between theatre and photography. I thought about how they both rely on lighting and staging, as well performance.”

Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2023-24)

“The title of this work translates to ‘The Work of Shadows’ and is a reference to Santu Mofokeng’s text ‘Chasing Shadows’,” she explains of her textile-based pieces. “It’s been in development for quite a few years now because materiality is a huge part of my work. I don’t think about photography as static but as quite fluid; not as a medium of evidence and surveillance but as a space for the imaginary.”

“I’ve taken photos from my family’s photo albums, which are relatively small, and brought life into them. So that's translated into the fabric which shimmers in the same way as an old plastic sleeve in a family photo album,” she adds. “The experience of seeing this work forces you to look upwards – the figures are elevated. I was thinking about what they were choosing to wear, how they were choosing to pose, and the agency that exists in photo albums. It becomes a space where people could perform their ideal selves.”

Keep the Light Faithfully (2022)

“I was reading about lighthouse keepers and discovered that there had been over 400 female lighthouse keepers across Europe and the US. However, through interviewing lighthouse keepers, either formerly or still in service in South Africa, I found that there had never been any female ones here. So, this work is about me using their memories to imagine myself as a female lighthouse keeper,” she says of the inspiration and research that drove this piece.

“I photographed all of the sites that I travelled to when I was doing these interviews, which covers several parts of South Africa and the different sort of lighthouses that still exist,” she explains of her process. These images were then cut, folded, pasted and assembled into tableaus. “I've always had an obsession with children's books, so with this work I was thinking about the photo album alongside pop-up books. I thought about the idea of how images are constructed in shadow theatre and as you open the pages of a pop-up book.”

A Burden Consumed in Sips (2023)

“This is my first work created outside of South Africa. I was invited by the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne to explore, interrogate or critique any part of their collection and as it was an ethnographic museum, there was a lot to consider,” Kganye shares. “I was interested in the female gaze in the collection and eventually encountered some large panoramic drawings by Marie-Pauline Thorbecke. She had gone on an expedition to Cameroon with her husband to document all of the things Germany had taken from the country.”

This inspired the artist to make her own trip across Cameroon and the result is a 22-panel, panoramic film. “The film is a symbolic restitution of objects that are currently in different museums in Germany. In it, you see me returning the objects to some of the sites that Marie-Pauline Thorbecke mentioned. Its title is about the burden of colonisation but also the film is about all of us taking this burden with us.”

The Work of Shadows by Lebohang Kganye is on view at La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussells, until 26 July, 2025.