South African artist, Lebohang Kganye has collaborated with The Georgian House Museum to create an installation as part of Bristol Photo Festival.

The Georgian House was once home to a sugar trader and his enslaved staff. Dipina tsa Kganya: Leave the light when you leave for good invites us to reflect on the legacy of colonialism as a shared history.

Lebohang’s black and white three-channel video installation offers a response to the violence of historical erasure of names and oral traditions.

The central component is the lighthouse featured in the middle channel of the video work. A light beam, in perpetual motion, casts light onto the surrounding ocean scene and in turn creates shadows in the two peripheral channels of the work.

In the first video, a lighthouse keeper appears as a custodian of this light, tending to it by continually cleaning the bulb – a light source that symbolically guides those lost at sea. The song featured in the work (composed by musician Thandi Ntuli) plays from a large, custom-built Polyphon music box, which is hand cranked in the third video.

These performative gestures are in conversation with the southern African practice of the ‘praise-singing’ of clan names as a way of passing down the origins of the family story as an act of resistance to historical erasure.

read more here
http://www.bristolphotofestival.org/dipina-tsa-kganya-leave-the-light-when-you-leave-for-good-lebohang-kganye/