Working in a variety of media that includes sculpture, installation, drawing and performance, Kemang Wa Lehulere uses found objects and salvaged materials to create environments and events that situate personal memories within, and in contrast to, collective narratives. Using conceptually loaded materials such as school desks, tyres, chalkboards and ceramic dogs, he poeticises the ‘double lives’ of objects - their potential for multiple interpretations - to tease out their ambivalent or subversive meanings through reconfiguration and assemblage. 

In an attempt to comprehend and process the trauma of South Africa’s contemporary history(s), his practice combines physical acts of excavation and deconstruction with strategies of collaboration across time - be it through referencing, re-framing or ‘call-and-response’ - with artists, writers and family members of personal significance. By re-presenting in his exhibitions the work of other practitioners, whose contributions are often only posthumously acclaimed, Wa Lehulere points to the politics of cultural erasure and asks us to consider the gap between individual (complex, lived) experience and official (sanctioned, reductive) accounts of history. Dealing in the visual language of institutions, Wa Lehulere’s work contributes to the discourse around structural violence and the urgency of decolonised education and theoretical research. 

To date, Wa Lehulere has had solo exhibitions at Göteborg Konsthall, Sweden (2021); Manchester International Festival, UK (2021); Tate Modern, UK (2019); Pasquart Art Centre, Switzerland (2018); MAXXI, Italy (2017); the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Germany (2017); the Art Institute of Chicago, USA (2016); Gasworks, UK (2015); as well as blank projects (2023); Galerie Tschudi (2023; 2020); Marian Goodman Gallery (2018); and Stevenson (2018; 2016; 2015; 2012). Selected group exhibitions include Stories of Resistance at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2021), Global(e) Resistance at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020), Beyond the Black Atlantic at Kunstverein Hannover (2020), Ernest Mancoba: I Shall Dance in a Different Society at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), May You Live in Interesting Times, the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Leaving the Echo Chamber, 14th Sharjah Biennale (2019); O Triângulo Atlântico, 11th Mercosul Biennial (2018); More For Less at A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town (2018); Tell Freedom. 15 South African Artists at Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2018); Performa 17, New York (2017); Art/ Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); African Odysseys at Le Brass Cultural Centre of Forest, Belgium (2015); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); The Ungovernables, the 2nd New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); A Terrible Beauty is Born, the 11th Lyon Biennale (2011) and When Your Lips Are My Ears, Our Bodies Become Radios at Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2010).

Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of Gugulective (2006), an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010) in Johannesburg. He was the winner of the inaugural Spier Contemporary Award in 2007, the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2010, and the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2012; he was one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013, won the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014 and was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts in 2015. Wa Lehulere was also the recipient of an Ampersand Foundation residency in New York in 2012. In 2017, he was Deutsche Bank’s ‘Artist of the Year’, the recipient of the fourth Malcolm McLaren Award and a finalist in the Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv, Ukraine. 

His work is represented in several notable public and institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), Centre Pompidou (France), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Es Baluard (Spain), Hirshhorn Museum (USA) and Tate London (UK).