EBONY/CURATED is pleased to present As Necessary as Bread, the debut solo exhibition by contemporary photographer Gabrielle Kannemeyer. The exhibition engages with the layered histories of South African horse culture as a site where displacement, erasure and cultural continuity are continuously negotiated. The exhibition title borrows from historian Sandra Swart’s book ‘Riding High’, in which she cites Jan van Riebeeck’s 17th-century description of horses being “as necessary as bread in our mouths.” Reframed here, the phrase highlights the entanglement of the horse in South Africa’s colonial project, serving as both an instrument of conquest and class stratification and as a locus of resistance, dignity, and continuity for communities historically excluded from dominant equestrian narratives. In As Necessary as Bread, the horse, the rider or driver, the photographer, and the camera converge as collaborators. The images resist flattening into a single meaning: they hold open the tension between colonial history and contemporary reclamation, between domination and joy. What emerges is not ethnography, but an embodied negotiation of heritage, belonging, and visibility.Gabrielle Kannemeyer’s work reminds us that leisure, spectacle, and tradition are not neutral privileges but contested terrains. Her photographs insist on recognition, on dignity, and on the right of historically marginalised communities to both make and enjoy culture.