BOH BOH : A Familiar Stranger

BOH BOH: A Familiar Stranger marks a significant step in Gwambe’s evolution from fashion and editorial photography into a socially and artistically engaged practice. Centred around his first return to Malawi in 2016, the exhibition presents a deeply personal meditation on return, belonging, and home. Fourteen years after migrating to the UK, Gwambe travelled back to Malawi in 2016, and used his camera to confront the complex and layered emotions of reconnecting with family, place, and memory. The result is a humanist series of photographs that captures the harmony and joy of daily life in suburban and rural Malawi.

Shot on medium-format Kodak film with a 1975 Mamiya 645, the photographs move through three spaces: Church, Village, and Home, featuring members of Gwabe’s extended family. Gwambe’s photographs capture the bittersweet tension of feeling both familiar and unfamiliar in a once-known place. A resonance that extends into archival material, moving image, and installation.

The exhibition also traces a family history shaped by mobility and the UK’s colonial
influence in Malawi through the commonwealth. In 1985, serving as bodyguard to the then President of Malawi, Gwambe’s maternal grandfather travelled to the UK for an official visit to Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth II. He was later awarded an honorary OBE. These legacies of movement between Malawi and Britain form a backdrop to Gwambe’s own journey, threading together heritage and migration.

The title, drawn from the casual Malawian greeting “Boh Boh,” anchors the project in its central paradox of homecoming as a complicated experience at once intimate and estranged. Debuting in Peckham, a place shaped by global migration, Gwambe’s work resonates as both personal narrative and shared experience of cultural hybridity, migration, and complex diasporic identities.