In Le Sale ka Kgotso, Lebohang Kganye (@lebohang_kganye) advances a profoundly layered inquiry into the entanglements of memory, language and spatial politics, situating her practice at the intersection of expanded photography and sculptural installation. Born in 1990 in Johannesburg, Kganye has consistently mobilised personal and archival material to interrogate postcolonial histories; here, however, she extends that inquiry into an immersive architectural form that implicates the viewer as both witness and participant.
Debuted at Fotografiska Berlin in 2025, the exhibition takes as its conceptual and physical anchor the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house, an emblem of post-apartheid aspiration introduced under Nelson Mandela in 1994. Rather than presenting the RDP house as a stable symbol of national progress, Kganye reconstructs it as a spectral, walkable structure fabricated from aluminium and steel. The resulting installation is at once solid and precarious, its ruptures and fissures refusing any easy narrative of resolution. In this sense, the house operates less as architecture than as metaphor: a materialisation of histories that remain unresolved and perhaps unresolvable.
Central to the work is Kganye's sustained engagement with the instability of language. The title Le Sale ka Kgotso, translated from Sesotho as "stay in peace," functions as both blessing and disturbance. A subtle shift in pronunciation evokes the tokoloshe, a figure from Southern African folklore associated with mischief and malevolence. This linguistic slippage becomes emblematic of the artist's broader concerns: the ways in which meaning is never fixed, and how gestures of comfort may simultaneously harbour unease. Language, like architecture, becomes a site of fracture, capable of sheltering, but also of unsettling.
What distinguishes this series within contemporary photographic discourse is its refusal of nostalgia. Although Kganye's practice frequently draws upon familial archives and oral histories, Le Sale ka Kgotso resists the sentimentalisation of the past. Instead, it stages a confrontation between myth and memory, allowing them to coexist without hierarchy or resolution. The domestic interior, traditionally coded as a site of intimacy and stability, is here rendered uncanny. Visitors traverse rooms that feel both familiar and estranging, encountering a space where personal histories bleed into collective narratives of displacement and inequality.
Additionally, the transposition of the RDP house into a European institutional context introduces a critical geopolitical dimension. By situating this distinctly South African form within Berlin, a city marked by its own histories of division and reconstruction, Kganye activates a dialogue that exceeds national boundaries. The installation thus becomes a site of convergence, where disparate histories of trauma and rebuilding are held in uneasy proximity.
Ultimately, Le Sale ka Kgotso can be understood as an essay in spatial form, one that interrogates how homes are constructed not only from physical materials but also from the fragile architectures of memory and language. Kganye's intervention lies in her ability to render these invisible structures perceptible, exposing their fractures while resisting the impulse to repair them. In doing so, she affirms her position as a leading voice in contemporary art; an artist for whom photography is not merely a medium but a conceptual framework through which the past is continually restaged, unsettled, and, in her own etymological lineage, brought into the light.
