LEBOHANG KGANYE レボハン・ハンイェ

Memory is a gesture repeated, a shadow returning across time; it rehearses itself in light, in paper, in wood. In Rehearsal of Memory, Lebohang Kganye presents a constellation of four major bodies of work that explore how families, nations, and identities are shaped by absence, inheritance, and imagination. Across photography, cut-out silhouettes, diorama lightboxes, patchwork fabric, and sculptural interventions, the exhibition transforms personal archives into immersive, living spaces where the past and present coexist.

Visitors enter a layered narrative in which South African histories, family stories, and postcolonial realities converge. Kganye repeatedly positions herself inside her own archive, inhabiting the silhouettes of ancestors, wearing her mother’s clothes, or appearing as a spectral double. In doing so, she rejects the distance between storyteller and story, making memory itself a fragile, performative practice.

Installed within Higashi Honganji, one of Kyoto’s most significant wooden temple complexes, the exhibition enters into dialogue with centuries of craftsmanship and the poetry of light filtered through wood and paper. Shadows, silhouettes, and material presence echo Japanese aesthetics, recalling the subtle gradations praised by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows. Here, memory becomes architecture, and history unfolds like a rehearsal: repeated, imagined, and experienced anew. Kganye invites viewers not merely to observe, but to inhabit memory, feeling its rhythms, gaps, and resonances, and recognising how the past continues to live within the present.

Text by Marina Paulenka