Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Shifting Sands, a new solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based artist Lindokuhle Sobekwa, winner of the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. The exhibition looks at a dialogue about land, memory and the fragile terrain of belonging across generations. In this new body of work, Sobekwa turns his lens inward and outward tracing his family’s routes between rural Eastern Cape, the township streets of Thokoza, and the liminal spaces that lie between. Sobekwa constructs a visual language that reflects a life lived between places and times.

The exhibition title, Shifting Sands, borrows from the title of esteemed South African photographer Santu Mofokeng’s seminal exhibition at the Market Theatre Galleries in Johannesburg in 1990. Mofokeng’s now famous exhibition opened four years before the official end of apartheid at one of the most important photography institutions in Africa. Mofokeng approached photography as both a personal ritual and a means of social record, an approach that marked a significant and influential departure from conventional practices at the time. It is this fluid, intimate and communal approach that is interpreted in Sobekwa’s work.

Sobekwa presents diptychs and triptychs that shift perspective and reflect on the movement of time. Photographs of hostels, viewed from within and from a distance recur throughout the exhibition, acting as quiet meditations on displacement and survival. Domestic interiors and transient cityscapes speak to the intimacy of everyday life, and the tensions it holds. This approach, grounded in close observation, allows even the most fleeting moments to carry emotional weight. Hanging laundry appears like ghostly figures in his photographs, caught between presence and absence. The clothing is often photographed suspended in wind or against textured walls emerges as a recurring motif and garments are vessels of memory, loss and identity. In his early work, the artist documented these spaces up close, however with time, he has gained the distance to step back and reflect on their everyday presence and the enduring significance they hold.