Hayward Gallery

Thabiso Sekgala

Here Is Elsewhere

28 Aug - 06 Oct 2019

© Thabiso Sekgala
Tiger, 2012
Inkjet fibra print
70x70cm
Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.
THABISO SEKGALA
Here Is Elsewhere
28 August - 6 October 2019

This free HENI Project Space exhibition explores home, intimacy, place and belonging in the work of late South African photographer Thabiso Sekgala.

Here Is Elsewhere – Sekgala’s first solo exhibition in the UK – brings together 50 photographs from six different series taken between 2009 and 2014 in South Africa, Jordan and Germany.

Many of Sekgala’s photographs – which include portraits, street scenes and elegiac depictions of public and domestic space – offer nuanced, alternative narratives about life in contemporary Africa.

Running through all of his work is a fascination with the idea of home, and the personal, political or economic conditions that determine our relationship to it.

This free HENI Project Space exhibition explores home, intimacy, place and belonging in the work of late South African photographer Thabiso Sekgala.

Here Is Elsewhere – Sekgala’s first solo exhibition in the UK – brings together 50 photographs from six different series taken between 2009 and 2014 in South Africa, Jordan and Germany.

Many of Sekgala’s photographs – which include portraits, street scenes and elegiac depictions of public and domestic space – offer nuanced, alternative narratives about life in contemporary Africa.

Running through all of his work is a fascination with the idea of home, and the personal, political or economic conditions that determine our relationship to it.

At the centre of Here Is Elsewhere are photographs from Sekgala’s early, career-defining Homeland (2009 – 2011), a series that saw the artist document life in two former homelands – territories established by the Apartheid government to house black South Africans forced to leave urban areas.

These images are accompanied by photographs from Second Transition (2012), a series that explores the relationship between the area’s platinum mines and the workers who live on the land, as well as Running, Amman (2013) and Paradise (2013), series made during periods spent in Amman and Berlin.

The idea of home is very complex, and changes depending on who you are and where you come from
THABISO SEKGALA

Thabiso Sekgala (b. 1981, Johannesburg, South Africa; d. 2014, Johannesburg, South Africa) held solo exhibitions in South Africa and Europe and has exhibited in group shows internationally, including LagosPhoto Festival (2015), Bamako Biennale (2015) and Les Rencontres D’Arles (2013).

In 2013, he was an artist in residence at both the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and at HIWAR/Durant Al Funun, Jordan. He studied at Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop in 2007 to 2008 and was awarded the Tierney Fellowship in 2010.

The exhibition is supported by The African Arts Trust.