Exhibitions

William Kentridge experienced an artistic breakthrough in the late 1980s with his charcoal drawings. Drawing is still central in his artistic production. From 1989 to 2011 he made ten films, Drawings for Projection, each of which used drawing as its starting point. The films are about the history of his hometown Johannesburg, both during and after the Apartheid regime. In later works, Kentridge elaborated further on several of the ideas and subjects from the series. In addition to working with South Africa’s complex political history, he has started to work with themes that deal with human emotions and memory in a wider sense.

Kentridge is interested in how we navigate through and understand the world in which we live. Viewing his films, we are constantly confronted with the possibilities and limitations of our way of seeing. An important point for Kentridge is that to see is self-deception: we do not just absorb information; we leave things out, change and add information based on what we already know about the world. Nevertheless, we often treat what we see as truth. One method Kentridge uses is to let one drawing form the basis for a whole sequence in a film. The drawing is filmed and re-filmed, with parts erased and redrawn numerous times. This slow and time-consuming process eventually results in a ‘living’ drawing, one that is constantly changing. New meanings are established at the same time as earlier drawings leave their traces in the paper. Such a work stands as a picture of how understanding and meaning fluctuate, and how earlier events in our lives affect how we experience the here and now.

The films 7 Fragments for George Méliès, Day for Night, and Journey to the Moon consist of nine projections. These films pay homage to early cinematic history, especially to the French film director Georges Méliès (1861–1938) and his experiments with magic. Méliès was originally an illusionist and magician, and in the early 1900s he directed several hundred films. Being one of the first to use special effects and illusionistic tricks in filmmaking, he is considered the originator of fictional film. Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) is one of his most famous works. Staged by Méliès in his film studio outside Paris, it is about a group of scientists who travel to the moon. At a time when outer-space travel was impossible, Méliès’s film triggered fascination amongst the public. The film questioned what was thought to be safe and well-known by exploring and staging what was as yet unknown.

Kentridge has described his method as ‘stone-age film-making’. His films have an old-fashioned expression, with references to black-and-white silent films and slap-stick comedy from the early days of cinematic history. His films are full of magical transformations. In Journey to the Moon, a coffee pot is suddenly turned into a spaceship, the coffee cup becomes a telescope and the saucer becomes the moon. The camera’s depiction of reality gives way to the unfettered imagination in a drawing. The action in Kentridge’s works takes place, as with Méliès, in the artist’s studio. Kentridge performs both in front of and behind the camera, so his films become pictures of the artist’s creative process. The studio becomes a stage for a performance that explores and questions the artist’s role and authority. The films shun a fixed narrative, such that viewers must create meaning for themselves. Kentridge shows us a world that does not hang together, but one in which we nevertheless, continuously and in different ways, create connections.

William Kentridge (b. 1955) lives and works in Johannesburg. He is one of South Africa’s most profiled contemporary artists, known for his drawings and animated films. Since participating in Documenta X in 1997, his works have been shown throughout much of the world. Kentridge has held several large museum exhibitions, among others, at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2007), SFMOMA in San Francisco (2009) and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010).