Lebohang Kganye: Le Sale ka Kgotso

Le Sale ka Kgotso, the new installation by the South African artist, will be on display at Fotografiska Berlin from mid-September 2025.

• 
• 
• 

Le Sale ka Kgotso means “stay in peace” in Sesotho. It is a farewell phrase that is said when leaving a house. But language is never unambiguous; it always conveys multiple levels of meaning. If the term is mispronounced—le sale le Kgotso—it conjures up not peace, but a Tokoloshe: a malicious, dangerous spirit from Xhosa and Zulu mythologythat brings illness, chaos, and mental turmoil.

Kganye draws attention to this linguistic slip and shows that words – like houses, like stories – can be ambivalent. Like the architecture she constructs, Kganye's language shows that it can itself become a place of horror. What appears to be a gesture of goodwill can in reality be an invocation of something much more threatening.

Le Sale ka Kgotso, the new installation by the South African artist, will be on display at Fotografiska Berlin from September 12, 2025, to January 25, 2026. Curated by Marina Paulenka and coordinated by Jessica Jarl, the exhibition invites visitors into a life-size, walk-in structure modeled after a Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house: The South African socio-economic housing programme, implemented by the government under President Nelson Mandela after the end of apartheid in 1994, serves here as an eerie framework that appears both massive and fragile, characterised more by fractures than solutions.

Opening hours: daily from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Runtime: Fri, 12/09/2025 to Sun, 25/01/2026

Takes place here:

• Fotografiska Berlin