Feminist artist channels male ancestor on the road to self-discovery

As the location of our highest court dealing with the protection of human rights you'd think that Joburg's Constitution Hill makes an ideal venue for feminist exhibitions.

But one of the last high-profile ones staged at this Joburg landmark did more to expose the inherent bias in the female figure who'd sanctioned it.

The year was 2010 and the then minister of arts and culture Lulu Xingwana classified a photographic work by Zanele Muholi picturing two women locked in an embrace as "pornographic" and demanded it be removed from the Innovative Women exhibition.

It's perhaps a positive outcome that Muholi's art will once again be exhibited at Constitutional Hill in another gender-slanted exhibition. Curated by Refilwe Nkomo and Thato Mogotsi, Being Her(e): meditation on African femininities may signal another triumphant shift for human rights in that this feminist show includes artists from other parts of Africa.

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Lebohang Kganye is a local artist who's perhaps been overlooked - she hasn't enjoyed a big solo in a commercial art gallery.

The inclusion of her art in this show is unexpected as she doesn't unravel the dynamics of the African female gender in any obvious ways - which is a relief.

Her largely photographic cutout collage practice initially pivoted on a man, her grandfather, though it was the death of her mother which prompted her interest in her ancestry. Stories around him and his move to Joburg loomed larger than life in her youth. Kganye became fixated with them and other family legacies.

"I was really interested in the origin and spelling of my surname; it had different spellings. Which was the right one? Who do I identify with? Sotho, Zulu or Bapedi?"

As a visual artist primarily interested in photography, the family photo albums were her main resource. She studied them in search of her history, identity and the truth about her grandfather.

"There were conflicting stories and they were told in multiple ways even by the same person. Memory was combining with fantasy; there wasn't anything factual to hold on to."

The absence of factual evidence was, to some degree, liberating for Kganye as she could play with these stories, generating a body of work in which she used large blown-up cutouts of family members and other props and landmarks to create new images, in which she was the starring character. It was a way of compensating for the fact that she "didn't exist in those photos in my family albums".

Interestingly, she chose to pose as her grandfather, resplendent in an oversized suit. This isn't unexpected given that, at the time, she was under the mentorship of Mary Sibande, the artist known for celebrating her matrilineal line by wearing domestic worker outfits.

For Kganye the process allowed her to "spend time with one image for a long time as I would work on a scene for at least a month. It required a lot of emotion."

Her journey towards self-discovery had little to do with her gender perse. However, in dressing up in a suit and posing as her grandfather - a male character - and projecting herself into dated images, in such works as Re shapa setepe sa lenyalo II (2013), it becomes clear that tracing ancestral lines is inherently underpinned by a gender bias.

It's significant that it's the stories of men - male ancestors - that Kganye must confront and understand in order to claim a space for herself in the present.

• 'Being Her(e): Meditations on African Femininities' is on at Constitutional Hill until June 9

• This article was originally published in the Times.