In KENTRIDGE’s cross-disciplinary, cross-media world of artistic creation, images are not merely background supporting characters for theatre or installations, but are seen as an important intermediary to understanding the world. Taking Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ as an example, he feels...
Other Faces returns to the figure of Soho Eckstein, the industrialist and developer who is the key protagonist of the Drawings for Projection series. In this cycle of nine films created from 1989 through 2003, Kentridge addresses the doubling and contrary sides of the self, personified in the...
William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas – two of the most celebrated names in international contemporary art – come face to face in a series of frank, witty and intense discussions about their work and practice. The film follows them from the gentle ambience of a dinner conversation, to their...
William Kentridge (1955) was inspired in this case by the novel by Italo Svevo The Conscience of Zeno (1923). Kentridge concentrates on the main character whose fears and interior torments reflect the social violence and the brutality of the First World War. Through Zeno, the artist explores the...
Drawing, literally, from the story of Daniel and Belshazzar, William Kentridge's film Weighing… and Wanting re-examines the legacy of Belshazzar's message in post-apartheid South Africa. While the political climate shared by Belshazzar's kingdom and apartheid-era South Africa is striking – in...
(REPEAT) From the Beginning is about fragmentation and reconnection, the fragility of coherence. The three projections, Breathe, Dissolve, Return offer three different ways of shattering an image and reconfiguring it.
The film sees a businessman (the Soho Eckstein figure from Kentridge's earlier films) standing on a hotel balcony watching the waves. Time passes, as the sea rolls back andforth in endless repetitions. We as viewers observed from his point of view. Then the scene shifts to a large drawing of a man,...
Soho Eckstein is portrayed as interconnected with both images of the social injustices and upheaval of South Africa and his own sort of primal, fractured existence.
Franz Schubert´s Winterreise engages with its audience in a new and unexpected form. Matthias Goerne, 'the voice of perfection' (Le Figaro), pianist Markus Hinterhäuser and South African director, set designer and theatrical artist William Kentridge joined forces on stage and traced newly...
"Tango for Page Turning" belongs to a constellation of work created for "Refuse the Hour", a multimedia chamber opera conceived and written by Kentridge in collaboration with composer Philip Miller and fellow South African choreographer Dada Masilo.
With his video History of the Main Complaint (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act.
In KENTRIDGE’s cross-disciplinary, cross-media world of artistic creation, images are not merely background supporting characters for theatre or installations, but are seen as an important intermediary to understanding the world. Taking Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ as an example, he feels...
William Kentridge’s Notes Towards a Model Opera (2014–15) is an 11-minute video work that pulses with visual ingenuity and historical resonance. Crafted for Beijing’s Ullens Center in 2015, it dissects the Cultural Revolution’s eight model operas—propaganda ballets and plays designed to...
