Lindokuhle Sobekwa Shifting Sands

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Shifting Sands, a new solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa, winner of the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

In this new body of work, Sobekwa turns his lens inward and outward tracing his family’s routes between rural Eastern Cape, the township streets of Thokoza, and the liminal spaces that lie between. Sobekwa constructs a visual language that reflects a life lived between places and times.

The exhibition title, Shifting Sands, borrows from the title of esteemed South African photographer Santu Mofokeng’s seminal exhibition at the Market Theatre Galleries in Johannesburg in 1990. Mofokeng’s now famous exhibition opened four years before the official end of apartheid at one of the most important photography institutions in Africa. Mofokeng approached photography as both a personal ritual and a means of social record, an approach that marked a significant and influential departure from conventional practices at the time. It is this fluid, intimate and communal approach that is interpreted in Sobekwa’s work

Sobekwa presents diptychs and triptychs that shift perspective and reflect on  the movement of time. Photographs of hostels, viewed from within and from a distance recur throughout the exhibition, acting as quiet meditations on displacement and survival. Domestic interiors and transient cityscapes speak to the intimacy of everyday life, and the tensions it holds. This approach, grounded in close observation, allows even the most fleeting moments to carry emotional weight. Hanging laundry appears like ghostly figures in his photographs, caught between presence and absence. The clothing is often photographed suspended in wind or against textured walls emerges as a recurring motif and garments are vessels of memory, loss and identity. In his early work, the artist documented these spaces up close, however with time, he has gained the distance to step back and reflect on their everyday presence and the enduring significance they hold.

Hostels remain an important subject for the artist. He captures the hostels in Thokoza which hold layered histories, from homes for migrant workers to sites of neglect and political violence in the early 1990s. It’s also where the artist’s sister was found after a decade of going mysteriously missing and unfortunately passed soon after.

Long stigmatised as dangerous or marginal, Sobekwa returns to these spaces with care and complexity, photographing their architecture and the people who occupy them with empathy. He challenges these dominant narratives by embedding himself over time, building trust with the occupants and documenting from both within and outside the buildings. Some hostel images were taken from taxis in passing, underscoring his interest in the accidental and the in-between. The dead roses floating on the dirty riverbanks create  ambiguity. For Sobekwa , it represents a reminder to slow down and notice the poetry in everyday life.

While the work emerges from specific contexts shaped by apartheid regime’s spatial legacies and ongoing inequalities, it resists fixed interpretations. Instead the photography in Shifting Sands, invites viewers to pause, to look closely and to sit with images that unfold slowly, revealing stories that linger long after the moment has passed. Seemingly disparate spaces; rural landscapes, urban spaces and intimate domestic scenes, are brought together through the artist’s fluid approach to meaning and narrative.  

His work is currently on view in Memento: South African Photographs at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, and he will feature in the group exhibition New Photography 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York opening September 2025.