Ke Lefa Laka / Her-Story, Volume 2

Lebohang Kganye
2021
Hardcover
Ke Lefa Laka / Her-Story, Volume 2: Lebohang Kganye
Publisher: Nazraeli Press
Dimensions: 6 x 8 1/2
Pages: 16, 15 four-color plates
ISBN: 978-1-59005-554-0
$ 60.00

Signed
Includes a 5x7 in. original print

 
Lebohang Kganya's series Ke Lefa Laka (Her-Story) stems from confronting grief from the loss of her mother, while maintaining a connection to her and generational history. The title translates to “it’s my legacy” in seSotho. Kganye explains, “Like Barthes looking at the photo of his mother, we look at the person and see the trajectory of their life. The fact that no matter how alive they look, the photograph points to all of our mortalities. The essence of my mother that I identify in these photographs is, in fact, my essence, my constructions, my memories and fantasies of this person who I met in only one capacity: namely, mother." 
 
Lebohang Kganye was born in 1990 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. Kganye’s practice explores a familial archive that is concerned with layered and temporal storytelling. While her work may resonate with a particularly South African experience; it critically engages with oral tradition as form and memory as a tangible source material. Kganye often incorporates the archival and performative into a practice that centers storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience. Her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in a myriad of ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative and the moving image.