Brundyn Arts & Culture (BA&C) presents a landmark exhibition by contemporary South African photographer Lebohang Kganye at the Boschendal x Brundyn gallery, on Boschendal Estate. The exhibition in the Manor House runs until 28 March while the ‘usculptures will be on display until the end of the year.
The Sea is History comprises of four large-scale pop-up sculptures on the historic grounds of Boschendal Werf and a solo exhibition Mmoloki wa Mehopolo: Breaking Bread with a Wanderer inside the Manor House. This presentation not only elevates the artist’s sculptural practice but also marks Kganye’s first significant presentation in South Africa. The exhibition coincides with the start of Cape Town Art Week – an exciting and creative season concentrated in the urban hub of the city – by offering a unique experience that extends this energy to the Cape Winelands.
Brundyn Arts & Culture is particularly excited to highlight Kganye’s artistic growth and ability to raise profound questions through her work. She is an artist radically redefining the field of photography by expanding it beyond its traditional two-dimensionality. By innovating photography’s material quality, her practice transcends the conventional boundaries of the medium and offers deeper explorations of heritage, migration, and family archives. In so doing, she creates rich technical, material, and conceptual juxtapositions between light and shadow, memory and history, and the persistent impact of storytelling.
In this exhibition Kganye also invites audiences to join in an immersive journey of discovery with four life-size interactive sculptures.
ABOUT BRUNDYN ARTS & CULTURE
Founded by Elana Brundyn, instrumental in launching both Zeitz MOCAA and Norval Foundation, pioneering art consultancy Brundyn Arts & Culture (BA&C) is located in the heart of Cape Town. Rooted in South Africa with a global outlook, and presenting deeper access to artists and the art industry, BA&C offers specialised services that focus on collection development, art projects and exhibitions, and educational programmes.
Questioning traditional cultural authorities, institutional models, and accepted narratives is at the core of BA&C’s practice. The consultancy takes its place in the transformative art ecosystem with an underpinning of expert knowledge, enabling BA&C to complement the collector’s personal journey.
“Art has the ability to unite us, regardless of our identities or whereabouts,” says Brundyn. “At BA&C, we work with people who are interested in art, from individual and corporate clients, to novice and seasoned art collectors. We aim to deepen understanding of artists and art itself within a global context.”
A collaboration with Johannesburg-based artist Lebohang Kganye, part of a new generation of South African artists, marks the opening of Brundyn Arts + Culture. Through photography, sculpture, performance, installation and film, Kganye explores what she calls “fictional history” – merging material and characters from her family archive, with resonant elements from theatre and literature, to create profound and moving imaginary scenarios. This collaboration is an inspired chapter in a series which will showcase different and more intimate facets of both art and artists in the Brundyn Arts & Culture space.
Brundyn firmly believes that art stands as a cornerstone of a robust and sustainable society, a conviction that strengthens her commitment to providing access to contemporary art and culture in South Africa and globally.
Brundyn Arts + Culture Services
- Collection Development: Brundyn recognises the investment value that collectors across the globe seek when acquiring artworks. Leveraging the extensive expertise of the team and their vast global network, BA+C grants deeper access to a diverse range of artworks. Undertaking the crucial responsibility of developing, diversifying, and preserving clients’ collections, their independent, confidential, and comprehensive services encompass market research, artwork acquisition and deaccessioning, logistics, collections management, after-sale services, and even assistance in establishing art foundations.
- Art Projects and Exhibitions: The production of world-class exhibitions and collaborative ventures with eminent contemporary artists, international galleries, and auction houses. BA+C’s museum-standard exhibition spaces, situated in the historic Mandela Rhodes Place in Cape Town, hold immense cultural and historical significance.
- Art and Educational Programmes: Understanding that art encapsulates value on multiple levels, BA+C works closely with clients to craft tailored art programmes that strategically amplify their brands and foster long-term engagement with a global audience. Leveraging their network and expertise, they bring together artists who align with each individual company’s brand values, communication objectives, and budgetary considerations. Moreover, the team provides guidance on philanthropic initiatives and implements educational programs, including specialised art tours and projects in collaboration with partners across the globe.
There is undoubtedly a surplus of meanings and heaps of complexity undergirding Kganye’s work, her search for herself and kin. She reveals that, “through this process of attempting to trace my history, I have discovered that identity cannot be traced.”[2] This here is not a sentiment rooted in pathos; probing deeper, we can rightly infer Kganye’s examination of South Africa’s deeply troubled racialised history that has shaped her own lineage, as it has shaped the country’s. There is here a memory of an abjection so perverse that it weakens familial ties and bonds. Kganye is relentless in pursuing this very inquiry: in bodies of work such as Ke Lefa Laka (2013), Pied Pipers Voyage (2014), Reconstruction of a family(2016), Dirithi (2016), Ke Sale Teng (2017) to name a few, she retrieves familial bonds between herself and her mother and her grandfather; she offers an ardent critique of apartheid induced displacement while revealing a propensity to constantly re-home herself through every new encounter with her disparate family. In these various bodies of work, we further come to understand, through Teju Cole’s illumination, that “memory has an menacing side to it.”[3] Such a verdict alerts us to the reality that Kganye’s excavation of a personal yet shared, fraught history presents no absolutes nor certainties – it is in some sense a site of the unknowable. This is precisely why the camera is the ideal apparatus through which her memory-work inspires a reimagination of how she is to know herself anew. For Kganye, the camera thus remains “a site for the performance of dreams and to stage the narratives of contradictions, half-truths; erasure, denial, hidden truths. A family identity therefore becomes an orchestrated fiction and a collective invention.”[4]
Salient here are the two words “stage” and “orchestration”. They invite us to reflect on her work with greater clarity since they announce Kganye’s agency, which is apparent both in how she inserts herself into her own images and in how she imputes narratives through different registers that reaffirm the very performative nature of her work. Notably, her photographs, cuttings, forays into theatre and literature, animations and installations all inform us of a continuous orchestration of a process immersed in self-invention. If memory is in its very form an unstable, precarious site, then Kganye’s approach, we might say, is one that attempts to elasticize its materiality – it opens a space where despite its arbitrariness, memory is explored to the fullest extent. More tellingly, her approach makes known her guile that finds expression through a careful arrangement of objects, feelings, ideas, sentiments, and questions that inform her becoming.
It is in this fact that we can, once again, appreciate her agency as a performer who orchestrates and stages the life-worlds of memories that entangle the past and the present – memories that make legible the now seminal superimposition of herself into her mother’s photographs as we saw in her inaugural artistic missive, Ke Lefa Laka (2013). From this aesthetical gesture, we would do well to note that her “memory-work” becomes in a strong sense a form of technology, a portal through which she encounters past, lived experiences anew, differently. Marianne Hirsch might concur with this premise: in her conception of postmemory, Hirsch duly observes the capacity to relive and re-encounter the personal, collective and cultural experiences of those who lived before through images, behaviours and stories.[5] It is thus unsurprising that Kganye’s oeuvre unfolds with a similar tenor. And yet, in all her artistic explorations, Kganye remains an ardent reconnoitre of the untold truths that history hides be they personal or collective.
