[9] Roland Barthes' eulogy to his late mother and reading of photography as overlapping past and present in Camera Lucida inspired Kganye's practice.
[11] As Kganye explains, by revisiting her family journey, she discovered that identity could not be traced: "it is an invention, constructed of true, half-true and untrue narratives, hopes, dreams and fears".
[11] Kganye's practice incorporates animated films, installations and large-scale sculpted papers and cut-outs as ways to re-experience the past and question the fabricated nature of history and memory.
[15][16] Kganye was the recipient of The Tierney Fellowship in 2012 and exhibited Her-Story and Heir-Story, two photographic series combined under the overall title "Ke Lefa Laka"[17] ("It's my inheritance," in Sesotho) at the Market Photo Workshop.
[7] Working under the mentorship of the visual artist Mary Sibande and curator Nontobeko Ntombela, Kganye explores her family story through re-performance, digital juxtapositions and photocollages.
[13] Source:[20] Besides the artist's family story, Lebohang Kganye's work explores the political and economic history of South Africa.
She photographs herself interacting with life-size black and white flat-mannequins of the characters related to her in family stories and photo albums, and in doing so, creates a juxtaposition between the present and the past.
[12] She inserts black silhouettes of characters from her family photo albums into a human-scale white box and places her grandfather at the centre of the stage.
[24] As Kganye explains: "A big difference compared to my previous series on this same process is that the characters here are reversed—the background is white, the silhouettes are black.
[26] Dirithi, as Kganye explains, evokes the passing of family figures and stresses the capacity of photography to act as a bridge between the dead and the living.
In her series Tell Tale (2018), she stages the stories of the villagers narrated in Athol Fugard's play Road to Mecca and Lauren Beukes' book Maverick.
The work does not attest to being a documentation of a people but presents their personal narratives, which they share over a cup of tea, homemade ginger ale or the locally brewed beer.
[27] In these theatre sets, Kganye attempts to highlight the capacity of oral stories to pass from one generation to the next and "perform ideals of a community".
[13] As she explains: "Through the use of silhouette cutouts of family members and other props in a diorama, the film confronts the conflicting stories, which are told in multiple ways, even by the same person.
[30] The installation Mohlokomedi wa Tora ("lighthouse keeper") in 2018 presents the story of her grandfather in life-size sceneries made of cardboards and cut-outs standing up in the exhibition space.
[31] Organising archival elements around a light positioned in the centre of the room, the artist creates a shadow play theatre and invites visitors to walk in and interact with each scene.
[31] As the artist explains, the work aims to stress the power of oral stories to shape vivid and collective imaginaries.