W inner of the 2023 FNB Art Prize Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s solo exhibition Umkhondo: Going Deeper will be at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, in collaboration with Goodman Gallery, from 24 August to 23 March. It unites two interconnected bodies of work — I Carry Her Photo With Me and Ezilalini (The Country) — seen together for the first time. Sobekwa, who was born in 1995 in Katlehong on the East Rand, is from a generation of South African photographers born after the first democratic elections of 1994.
In Ezilalini (The Country) bucolic rolling hills and entirely flat landscapes belie the beauty and the scars of erosion that quietly mark the landscape. Reflecting on the horizon as a place where one never fully arrives, Sobekwa documents his journey from Katlehong to his ancestral home in the country, where his maternal grandmother still lives, in Tsomo, in the Eastern Cape. “I visited places where my mother is from, Tsomo, and where my father is from, Qumbu, and collected oral history of my family,” says Sobekwa.
“I tried to put all of that into the images as a way to mark history and family narratives that go unheard and are significant.” At the heart of the exhibition lies Sobekwa’s ongoing project, I Carry Her Photo With Me , which he began in 2017, following the painful experience of the disappearance and eventual death of his sister Ziyanda. Prompted by a found family portrait with Ziyanda’s face missing, I Carry Her Photo With Me , has seen multiple iterations.
Developed into a handmade photobook for inclusion in African Cosmologies at the FotoFest Biennial Houston in 2020, the project includes a film interpretation, which will be shown for the first time in Johannesburg. The seven-minute video is an intimate portrait through image, text and sound. Images from the series — colourful clothes hanging on a washing line, the hostel where Ziyanda was found a decade later, hand-written scribbles and notes — intertwine over a poetic and melancholic composition which is scored by South African jazz musician and scholar Nduduzo Makhathini.
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