Kemang Wa Lehulere: Sincerely yours, at Gasworks Gallery, London

The first presentation within the new gallery space at Gasworks in London is a solo exhibition by South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere. Kemang Wa Lehulere works in a variety of media, including performance, drawing, installation, text, and photography. Wa Lehulere’s work includes creating events and environments as tools to help understand South Africa’s past and present. His work engages with the spaces between personal narrative and collective history as well as between processes of amnesia and archive. For his exhibition at Gasworks, the artist has created a large-scale wall drawing alongside other wall-based and sculptural works. This exhibition, entitled ‘Sincerely yours’, marks Kemang Wa Lehulere’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Kemang Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 in Cape Town, where he lives and works. Recent solo exhibitions include Lombard Freid Projects, New York (2013); Stevenson, Johannesburg (2015 and 2012); the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2011) and the Association of Visual Arts in Cape Town (2009). Group shows include the Edinburgh Art Festival (2015); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); ‘Public Intimacy: Art and Social Life in South Africa’ at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); ‘The Ungovernables’, the 2nd New Museum triennial in New York (2012); and ‘A Terrible Beauty is Born’, the 11th Biennale de Lyon at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France (2011). Wa Lehulere was a co-founder, in 2006, of Gugulective, an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and is a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg (2010–ongoing). He was jointly awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013 and recently won the 2015 Standard Bank South Africa, Young Artist Award.

Breakfast view and tour, Gasworks Gallery, London, October 14, 2015.

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