Lindokuhle Sobekwa Dossier 2024

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.

Mthimkhulu III is the first work on show in the exhibition: a tree, several metres high, constructed from torn paper, written texts, photocopies and family portraits, is spreading its branches across the wall of the Bel étage. This autobiographical, site-specific installation refers to Sobekwa’s ancestral clan name uMthimkhulu, which directly translates to ‘the big tree’. After visiting his ancestral home and learning about their cultural connections to trees in relation to a personal family history of migration, he began documenting these ideas in the form of a family tree. In this project, Sobekwa has created a collage using fragmented images of two different trees: one from Johannesburg and one from the Eastern Cape. 

The work represents the traces of his ancestors, their names, and the places they have walked. It is an attempt to ‘map’ and document Sobekwa’s family, but also a means of narrating a rich oral family history that has long remained elusive to the artist due to fragmentation, caused by economic and forced migrations.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa belongs to a new generation of South African photographers who were ‘born free’ after the first democratic elections of 1994. He was introduced to photography in high school through the Of Soul and Joy Project in Thokoza, the township in Johannesburg where he grew up, and started by photographing birthday parties and weddings. Later he realised that the medium of photography could be a very important tool to tell stories that concern and interest him.

His very first project, Nyaope (2013-2014), bears witness to this. 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 drug has caused a national crisis in South Africa,’ he explains. 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