LINDOKUHLE SOBEKWA

The exhibition title, ‘Shifting Sands’, borrows from the titleof esteemed South African photographer Santu Mofokeng’sseminal exhibition at the Market Theatre Galleries inJohannesburg in 1990. Mofokeng’s now famous exhibitionopened four years before the official end of apartheid at oneof the most important photography institutions in Africa.Mofokeng approached photography as both a personalritual and a means of social record, an approach that markeda significant and influential departure from conventionalpractices at the time. It is this fluid, intimate and communalapproach that is interpreted in Sobekwa’s work.

Sobekwa presents diptychs and triptychs that shift perspectiveand reflect on the movement of time. Photographs of hostels,viewed from within and from a distance recur throughout theexhibition, acting as quiet meditations on displacement andsurvival. Domestic interiors and transient cityscapes speak tothe intimacy of everyday life, and the tensions it holds. Thisapproach, grounded in close observation, allows even themost fleeting moments to carry emotional weight. Hanginglaundry appears like ghostly figures in his photographs,caught between presence and absence. The clothing isoften photographed suspended in wind or against texturedwalls emerges as a recurring motif and garments are vesselsof memory, loss and identity. In his early work, the artistdocumented these spaces up close, however with time, he hasgained the distance to step back and reflect on their everydaypresence and the enduring significance they hold.

Hostels remain an important subject for the artist. He capturesthe hostels in Thokoza which hold layered histories, fromhomes for migrant workers to sites of neglect and politicalviolence in the early 1990s. It’s also where the artist’s sisterwas found after a decade of going mysteriously missing andunfortunately passed soon after.

Long stigmatised as dangerous or marginal, Sobekwa returnsto these spaces with care and complexity, photographingtheir architecture and the people who occupy them withempathy. He challenges these dominant narratives byembedding himself over time, building trust with theoccupants and documenting from both within and outsidethe buildings. Some hostel images were taken from taxis inpassing, underscoring his interest in the accidental and the in-between. The dead roses floating on the dirty riverbanks createambiguity. For Sobekwa, it represents a reminder to slow downand notice the poetry in everyday life.

While the work emerges from specific contexts shaped byapartheid regime’s spatial legacies and ongoing inequalities,it resists fixed interpretations. Instead the photography in’Shifting Sands’, invites viewers to pause, to look closely andto sit with images that unfold slowly, revealing stories thatlinger long after the moment has passed. Seemingly disparatespaces; rural landscapes, urban spaces and intimate domesticscenes, are brought together through the artist’s fluidapproach to meaning and narrative.I never had the chance to photograph my sister when she wasalive, so the first thing I photographed after she passed awaywere the clothes that belonged to her, ” says Sobekwa.

His work is currently on view in ‘Memento: South AfricanPhotographs’ at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, and he willfeature in the group exhibition ‘New Photography 2025’ atthe Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York openingSeptember 2025.