Lindokuhle Sobekwa Dossier 2024

Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Umkhondo: Going Deeper
Johannesburg Art Gallery
24 August 2024 - 23 March 2025

The Johannesburg Art Gallery, in collaboration with Goodman Gallery, is proud to present Umkhondo: Going Deeper, Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s first solo exhibition at the museum, following his 2023 FNB Art Prize Award. 

Umkhondo: Going Deeper unites two significant and interconnected bodies of work  — I carry Her photo with Me and Ezilalini (The Country) — seen together for the first time. The exhibition showcases Sobekwa’s journey of introspection and discovery as he wrestles with absence, loss and belonging. 

It reflects his deep interest in (re)enactments of memory, personal histories and lived realities while also drawing attention to broader societal issues through a lens-based practice that spans over a decade. In ‘Umkhondo: Going Deeper’ Sobekwa critically examines the enduring legacies of historical injustices and their effects on personal and collective identities, work he describes as “confronting the deep scars left by apartheid and colonialism…exploring the fragmentation and poverty that continue to reverberate through South African society."

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uMthimkhulu III exists as an autobiographical installation reminiscent of a family tree by Lindokuhle Sobekwa, placing framed family photographs on a charcoal tree. The work refers to the ‘ihlathi lesiXhosa’, the shrubs and forests in the Eastern Cape that have a sacred significance for the amaXhosa people. The proliferating roots, branches and trunk represent how Sobekwa’s attempts to connect his life in Johannesburg with his ongoing journey to discover more about the lives of his family members and his ancestral home in the Eastern Cape. In the work, he makes visible for the viewer the way he uses symbolism to link images and family stories. This can be seen through hand-drawn lines, train tracks and the use of clan names and phrases that speak to familial roots as well as draws on the landscapes of both the Eastern Cape and the city of Johannesburg. 

This is the third iteration of the work, with the first produced during his residency at A4 Arts Foundation in 2020. In this work, Sobekwa embraces collage techniques and intuitive use of materials.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Heart of the garden
Goodman Gallery, London 
27 March - 8 May 2024

South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s first solo presentation in London titled Heart of the garden explored the multiplicity of place and identity. This new body of work reflected on the lingering effects of Apartheid with reference to his family history and his ancestral home in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

The presentation included work from Sobekwa’s series Ezilalini (The country) which offers a reflection on the division between the rural and urban areas structured by Apartheid spatial planning; a deliberate system that still affects family structures and economic access today. This division is represented through his photographic journey from his birthplace Katlehong - a large township in the south-east of Johannesburg - to where his grandmother lives in Tsomo in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. The work unpacks the complex sense of spiritual longing and desire to reconcile psychogeographic dislocation that comes from being in a place where one exists out of forced familial fragmentation and systemic dispossession. 

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Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Umkhondo: Tracing Memory
Huis Marseille, Amsterdam 
21 May - 4 September 2022

In Umkhondo: Tracing Memory Lindokuhle Sobekwa combines existing and new work in order to trace the thematic lines that run through his photographs. His family, his ancestors, and the landscape in which they live on are recurring themes in his oeuvre and form part of Sobekwa’s search for explanations for past events. His moving and intimate work directs the gaze towards his immediate surroundings, to his own identity and to the related larger issues at play in South African society.

In Xhosa, the photographer’s mother tongue, the word Umkhondo can have many different meanings. It can be ‘tracing’ or ‘tracking’ something, but it can also refer to evidence, a symptom of sickness or a footprint. In the exhibition at Huis Marseille, Sobekwa traces various routes through his own work and connects certain mysterious events, mapping out his own narrative along the way.

This first-ever museum exhibition is the European introduction of a talented young photographer following in the footsteps of great South African names like Santu Mofokeng and David Goldblatt. Like the photographers who have inspired him, Sobekwa critically examines large themes such as race, class, and segregation and approaches them from the perspective of his own experiences and memories, making his work personal and intimate. Photographer and mentor Mikhael Subotzky has called him ‘preternaturally talented’ and admires in his work ‘a vision and a sensitivity that is already uniquely his’. The exhibition offers an overview of all Sobekwa’s projects, which are often long-term and on which he works in alteration. In Huis Marseille each series can be seen as an Umkhondo, a trace on the route.

His is very first project, Nyaope (2013-2014), named after the eponymous drug – an extremely addictive, cheap variant of heroin – it follows users in Thokoza. ‘I hoped that my images would ignite some kind of conversation in my community about nyaope. The emotionally charged, personal black and white images are accompanied by the recent follow-up project Nyaope Chapter II, in which the photographer revisits many of his subjects, exploring various narratives including rehabilitation and ongoing drug use. The project also expands into a participatory approach, with some of his subjects making scrapbooks based on stories they have shared and images he has taken.

The heart of the exhibition is formed by the video installation I carry Her photo with Me (2018). In a moving slideshow that leafs through a scrapbook of photographs and notes, Sobekwa goes in search of his older sister Ziyanda. She suddenly disappeared at the age of thirteen, and shortly after her return, after having been missing for fifteen years, she passed away. With the exception of a group photo, from which her face was cut out for the purposes of her funeral, there does not exist a single photograph of her. 

The project is a means for Sobekwa to engage both with the memory of his sister and the wider implications of such disappearances — a troubling part of South Africa’s history. The book complements his wider work on fragmentation, poverty and the long-reaching ramifications of apartheid and colonialism across all levels of South African society.

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Throughout the exhibition it becomes clear that Sobekwa’s thematic lines all lead to the same core. His works are a means of examining and interpreting his environment, and with that, himself. It makes his work extremely personal and vulnerable. At the same time, his experiences expose larger themes from South Africa’s turbulent history. Sobekwa’s search for his own family, ancestors, culture and identity is part of a wider reality in which the effects of migration, colonialism and apartheid continue to disrupt and uproot generations to this day.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky: Tell it to the Mountains
A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town
20 October 2021 - 20 January 2022

Tell It to the Mountains in A4’s gallery emerged from a gesture of return. Throughout Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s residency at A4 last year, he reassembled his photographic practice out of sequence and time, building a horizon line onto the foundation’s walls. The exhibition’s title reimagines that of James Baldwin’s 1953 novel – Go Tell It on the Mountain – and the African-American spiritual of the same name. “Go back to where you started,” Baldwin writes, “or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it.” 

Tell It to the Mountains, writes Sean O’Toole, is “rooted in friendship and a shared enquiry into the meaning of home and belonging.” Mikhael and Lindokuhle’s affinity is one of friends as well as colleagues. Here, Mikhael becomes an interlocutor and conversation partner to the installation of Lindokuhle’s photographic series Ezilalini (The country) (2018 – ongoing). The series traces Lindokuhle’s return to his ancestral home in the Eastern Cape, where his generational family resides and the inzinyanya (ancestors) can be felt. The countryside, with its areas of trees and forest, is of particular importance to facilitate these connections. Lindokuhle recalls a story about the inzinyana; that they have forsaken the cities – of Johannesburg and the area of Thokoza where he grew up – because the children of the Eastern Cape arrive there to become lost, never to return. The disappearance of his sister Ziyanda is explored in I carry Her photo with Me (2017–ongoing), which is staged in Tell It to the Mountains as a slideshow with a musical score by Nduduzo Makhathini.

Tate Talks - Lindokuhle Sobekwa in conversation at the Tate Modern