Lebohang Kganye

Le Sale ka Kgotso by South African artist Lebohang Kganye explores the home as a place where safety and unease, family memories, mythology and folklore intertwine. Combining photography, sculpture and scenography in a distinctly original way, Kganye creates life-sized staged worlds in which photography moves beyond the confines of the frame and becomes a spatial experience.

The exhibition draws on South African oral traditions, yet its stories echo motifs and beliefs familiar across the world, revealing how narratives from seemingly different cultures can emerge from surprisingly similar fears, warnings and imaginings.

The art of storytelling

Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990) is a South African artist based in Johannesburg who brings a new dimension to photography, transforming images into spatial narratives.

Conceived exclusively for Fotografiska, Le Sale ka Kgotso invites visitors to walk through full-scale 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. Moving through a series of interconnected rooms, visitors encounter layers of family memory, mythology, and collective storytelling. The exhibition explores the home as both a place of refuge and a site of unease, charged with history and identity.

The installation unfolds as a sequence of five staged scenes, each set in a different room of the house or on the street. These are not static tableaux, but deliberately theatrical constructions. Drawing on South African oral traditions, folklore, and intergenerational storytelling, Kganye’s narratives are less about the past and more about the persistence of belief systems, rituals, superstitions, and communal memories that continue to shape everyday life.

”What photography has always been about is evidence, a tool of evidence. But actually it is also the tool of imaginary, and also linking to memories and how the memory is not factual. A lot of imagination goes in to it” says Lebohang Kganye.

”A large part of my practice is centered around oral history and storytelling but particularly also the generational transmission of stories. I brought in mythology and all of these stories I have heard growing up in the township, many of them very bizarre.”

Stay in peace

Le Sale ka Kgotso roughly translates as “stay in peace” in Sesotho, a farewell phrase spoken in South Africa when leaving someone’s home. However, the expression is ambiguous.

When pronounced as “Le sale le Kgotso,” it instead evokes not peace, but a tokoloshe: a mischievous and dangerous spirit from Xhosa and Zulu mythology, believed to cause illness, chaos, and spiritual disturbance. By highlighting how a slight mispronunciation can entirely alter the meaning of the phrase, Lebohang Kganye reflects on how words – much like family situations and histories – can carry double meanings.

Working at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and installation, Kganye uses family archives and staged environments to explore how personal narratives shape and challenge broader histories. Her works are deeply rooted in historical material, yet never nostalgic. They speak to an ongoing present: political, dreamlike, and intimate at once.

About the artist

Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, South Africa) works with expanded photography, video and mixed media to create works that layer historiography, research, theatricality, autobiography and poetics in often sculptural installations. The artist’s family name is etymologically linked to the Sotho word for light “kganya”; bringing light to layered postcolonial histories is an animating thread in her practice.

Kganye’s work is held in collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Getty Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and others. In 2022, Kganye exhibited in the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The artist has recently exhibited at MoMa, TATE, Barnes Foundation, and others.

The exhibition Le Sale ka Kgotso first opened in Fotografiska Berlin in 2025 and was exhibited at Fotografiska Stockholm from March to October, 2026.