It was recently announced that Kemang Wa Lehulere has been named the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year for 2017. His latest exhibition, The Knife Eats at Home, opened at Stevenson in Braamfontein last Thursday, while last year's exhibition, History Will Break Your Heart, is still on show at the Standard Bank Gallery for the rest of the week. This exhibition has been touring SA since it first showed at the National Art Festival almost a year ago, after Wa Lehulere was named Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year 2015.Wa Lehulere has been raking in awards consistently for almost a decade, since around the time of the very first Spier Contemporary Art Award, and has exhibited around the world. Although he's been widely feted, Wa Lehulere's work isn't easy or accessible. It's highly conceptual and has been accused of being obscure. It can be frustrating and resistant to interpretation, but in that lies some of its magic.If you had to say what Wa Lehulere's central preoccupation is, it would be along the lines of lost and erased histories, memories and the way the past is simultaneously always with us, but lost.In The Knife Eats at Home, Wa Lehulere reuses and extends a number of the themes and motifs that have appeared in his earlier exhibitions. There are installations with arrangements of repurposed school desks, turned into swings or giant paper planes. In History Will Break Your Heart, he used gum boots with their soles covered in gold. In this exhibition there are school shoes. The gold ceramic dogs and music stands that appear in many of his works are here again in abundance, as are the old-fashioned brown school briefcases. The chalk boards with drawings, diagrams and erasures are here too, as are the collaborations with his aunt, Sophia Lehulere.In this exhibition Wa Lehulere finds himself deploying them to explore his thinking about colonialism and education.Sometimes his works appear to re-enact the well-trodden territory of post-colonial theory. The opening artwork features a stuffed parrot listening to instructional tapes teaching American English pronunciation. While such artefacts of cultural domination and exploitation create a shudder of disbelief that they existed at all, ultimately it seems like just another articulation of post-colonial theory.Where his work is most profound is when it deals with the question of the role of art and imagination in relation to the lives erased by history, and how to make a space for that in the present. Some of these works manage to conjure a silence, a sense of the muteness of the past, and begin to make it possible to acknowledge what is beyond imagination. The political and historical dimensions of the questions remain clear, but that's a real artistic achievement worth the difficulty and effort.On until July 15, stevenson.info..