Homeland

The 2010/2011 Tierney Fellow at the Market Photo Workshop, Thabiso Sekgala, will feature at The Photo Workshop Gallery with his debut solo exhibition, Homeland. The exhibition opens on 6 April at 18h00 and will run until 30 May. An opening address will be given by Sekibakiba Lekgoathi.

Homeland is the culmination of over a year’s exploration of memory, place and interrelated self-imagining. It is based in the former homelands, areas defined by the apartheid government for the purposes of confining, defining and disempowering a people; and with subtlety and sensitivity, it considers how people develop place-related identities out of so notorious a past and the complex ways in which people develop nostalgia for histories that could be considered illegitimate.

Sekgala engages concepts of home and how particularly young people establish an understanding of what it means to call a place home and concurrently think beyond it.
 
There will be a walkabout with Thabiso Sekgala on 13 April at 1pm. A panel discussion, chaired by Leora Faber, will be held on 20 April from 6pm. The panel discussion will consider explorations of belonging in photography, and South African society more broadly.

Homeland was completed at the Market Photo Workshop as part of the Tierney Fellowship, a US-based fellowship that boasts fellows throughout the world at institutions such as Yale University (USA), Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexico) and Three Shadows Photography Art Center (China). For more information on the Tierney Fellowship, visit www.tierneyfellowship.org.