b.1984, Cape Town

Working against collective forgetting, Kemang Wa Lehulere gives to South Africa’s recent past images, objects and gestures – each a mnemonic sign for those stories lost in historical abstraction. His installations and performances navigate between amnesia and archive, affording poetic translations of memory’s mechanisms. Wa Lehulere counts among his many mediums collaboration, quotation, objects found and made, and chalk. To chalk he gives material significance, for its pedagogy, its fragility, the palimpsest of a blackboard. It extends, he suggests, “into broader ideas around history and memory; the writability of history…the erasure of history, the marginalisation of certain histories, and the re-writing of history.” Wa Lehulere’s historical impulse is not one of nostalgia, but rather a critical re-examination of inherited truths. History, after all, is not static but generative. To the artist, it lends itself to be reimagined and revised.