KEMANG WA LEHULERE, I Love You Too, a collection of love letters from the people of Manchester

230pp., hardback, (Manchester), 2021 

In 2019 South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere was artist in residence at the Manchester International Festival (MIF19). At the start of 2021, he invited more than 100 people from across Manchester to share their love stories.

"Tasked with writing love letters, a number of established writers sat with over 100 Manchester residents. They engaged in a dialogue that inspired the writing of letters which the participants could take home. These love letters were not necessarily required to be written to a person, but were open-ended towards objects, places and memories ... the aspiration is to paint a social portrait through prose and poetic form by way of public declarations of intimacy." Kemang Wa Lehulere, from this introduction

I Love You Too also featured an installation created for the Wolfson Reading Room at Central Library (2–10 July 2021).

Kemang Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 in Cape Town, where he lives and works. He was a co-founder of the Gugulective (2006), an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010) in Johannesburg. He won 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 and the recipient of the fourth Malcolm McLaren Award.