Thabiso Sekgala: Here Is Elsewhere

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.

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.