South African photographer and visual artist Lebohang Kganye has been announced as the 2021/2022 winner of the Grand Prix Images Vevey. Her winning project, Staging Memories, was praised by the jury for its ‘visual inventiveness, historical rigor, and daring conceptualisation’.
Staging Memories is a particular development in Kganye’s new series entitled In Search for Memory which she began in 2020. In this series, Kganye proposes to ‘offer a response to the fictional novella by Malawian writer Muhti Nhlema titled Ta O’Reva, seeking so to interrogate the human need to retain and recall shared narratives and exploring the contradictions and fictions therein.’
Born in South Africa and based in Johannesburg, Kganye has a practice deeply informed by the concerns and techniques of master artists from South Africa like William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Zanele Muholi. She employs archival photographic imagery, much of it derived from family albums, and materials that move across a seamless series of genres: photography, collage, installation, and set design.
For the first public iteration of Staging Memories for Images Vevey, Kganye will produce a large-scale three-dimensional installation exploring the materiality of photography in dialogue with the disciplines of theatre and literature.
The jury of the Grand Prix Images Vevey is chaired by the photographer, curator and writer Teju Cole, and composed of Frederica Angelucci (director, Stevenson Gallery), Milena Carstens (director of photography, ZEITmagazin) Julien Guerrier (director of publication, Louis Vuitton) and Shoair Mavlian (director, Photoworks).
See more of Kganye’s work on her website.
