"Rehearsal of Memory"

Speakers Speakers

• Lebohang Kganye (KYOTOGRAPHIE 2026 Artist)

  

  © Earl Abrahams-min

  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 is featured in MoMA New Photography 2025. Her recent touring solo exhibition, Le Sale ka Kgotso, debuted at the Fotografiska, Berlin (2025), and features newly commissioned work. She is the recipient of the 2024 Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize for her solo exhibition at Foam (2023). Other notable recent awards include the ICP Infinity Award, 2025, the Foam Paul Huf Award, 2022 and the Camera Austria Award, 2019.
  
  The artist has recently exhibited at the Albertina Museum, Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, LE BAL, the Barnes Foundation, and other notable institutions. In 2022, Kganye exhibited in the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
  
  Kganye’s work is held in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Getty Museum, and the Chazen Museum, among others.

• Marina Paulenka (Independent Curator)

  

  Marina Paulenka by Rahi Rezvani

  Marina Paulenka is an independent curator, artistic director, and educator based in Berlin,
  originally from Croatia. Her work focuses on contemporary photography and interdisciplinary artistic practices that explore the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the image. She has curated numerous exhibitions internationally and collaborated with museums, festivals, and cultural institutions across Europe and beyond.
  She is the founder of Organ Vida International Photography Festival, Croatia’s leading
  photography festival, which she developed into an internationally recognised platform for critical dialogue through photography and visual arts. From 2022 to 2025, she served as the founding Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska Berlin, where she established the museum’s curatorial vision and public programme. Previously, she was Artistic Director of Unseen Amsterdam art fair ,leading the platform’s artistic and institutional strategy and expanding its international scope by introducing galleries and artists from diverse regions.
  Drawing on her post-Yugoslav background and broader Balkan heritage, Paulenka’s curatorial practice engages with questions of feminism, identity, human rights, and the politics of representation. Her work foregrounds artists and perspectives from diverse cultural contexts,building connections between histories, geographies, and imagined futures.