Ink Rats
Current Events
Group Exhibition
The True Size of Africa
November 9, 2024 – August 17, 2025
Völklinger Hütte, Völklingen
Group Exhibition
Tuning In – Acoustique de l’émotion
October 3, 2024 – August 25, 2025
Foundation of the International Red
Cross and Red Crescent Museum,
Geneva
Forthcoming Events
Performance
Wozzeck
April 25 – May 16, 2025
Canadian Opera Company
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto
A sporadic record of what happens in the studio, in video, words and images
The Great Yes, The Great No
US PREMIÈRE PERFORMANCE
Adrienne Arsht Center
for the Performing Arts
Miami, Florida
December 5 to 8, 2024
US première performances of the chamber opera by William Kentridge, commissioned by LUMA Foundation, in partnership with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence
Creative team
Concept | Director: William Kentridge
Associate Directors: Nhlanhla Mahlangu | Phala O. Phala
Choral Composer: Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Music Director: Tlale Makhene
Dramaturg: Mwenya Kabwe
Costume Design: Greta Goiris
Set Design: Sabine Theunissen
Lighting Design: Urs Schönebaum | Elena Gui
Projection Editing | Compositing: Žana Marović | Janus Fouché | Joshua Trappler
Cinematography: Duško Marović SASC
Video Control: Kim Gunning
Performed and created by
Performers: Xolisile Bongwana, Hamilton Dhlamini, William Harding, Tony Miyambo, Nancy Nkusi, Luc de Wit
Dancers : Thulani Chauke & Teresa Phuti Mojela
Chorus: Anathi Conjwa, Asanda Hanabe, Zandile Hlatshwayo, Khokho Madlala, Nokuthula Magubane, Mapule Moloi,Nomathamsanqa Ngoma
Musicians: Marika Hughes (Cello), Nathan Koci (Accordion | Banjo), Tlale Makhene (Percussion), Thandi Ntuli (Piano)
Produced by THE OFFICE performing arts + film
A project of the Centre for the Less Good Idea
Lead commissioner: LUMA Foundation, Arles, France
Co-Commissioners: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami USA; CAL Performances, Berkeley USA; Centre d’Art Battat, Montreal, Canada.
Foundational commissioning support for the development and creation of “The Great Yes, The Great No” is provided by Brown Arts Institute at Brown University
Toured in partnership with Quaternaire
“While I was trying to make minimal or residual horses, I was also trying to make anti-heroic horses. Horses that would have the least right to be on monuments. I discovered this was not easy. Even the most ill-shaped, hollow-backed beasts with the most distorted neck and heads still claimed and held their space.” WK
“I am not me, the horse is not mine”
Galeria Arsenał
Białystok, Poland
Until 19 January, 2025
I am not me, the horse is not mine, 2008
Installation of 8 film fragments
6 minutes
Directing, animation, photography and performance: William Kentridge
Editing: Catherine Meyburgh
Composer: Philip Miller
Stage direction: Sue Pam-Grant
Animation assistants: Gerhard Marx, Naomi van Niekerk, Catherine Walker Galop Music
Composition: Philip Miller
“Ngilahlekelelwe Ikhala Lami”
Musical arrangement: Philip Miller
Music and lyrics: Richard Siluma and Thulani Manana Choir: Thulani Manana and Abanikazi Bomkhalanga
The Galop Band:
Dan Selsick, trombone; Billy Middleton, tuba; Adam Howard, trumpet; Ntkozo Zunga, Castrol tin-can guitar; Bethuel Mbonani, percussion; Thulani Manana, vocal leader
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
Fundació Sorigué, Lleida
October 22 - July 30, 2025
An exhibition of drawings, film and sculpture from the collection of Fundació Sorigué has opened in Lleida, featuring “Tide Table”, “7 Fragments for Georges Méliès ” and “Journey to the Moon”, alongside the series of drawings “Middle-Aged Love” and the eight channel film installation, “More Sweetly Play the Dance”.
Photos courtesy of Fundació Sorigué
OPENING TONIGHT
“OH TO BELIEVE IN ANOTHER WORLD”
A film by William Kentridge for Shostakovich Symphony
No. 10
Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona
18 & 19 October, 2024
Performed by Orquestra Simfònica del Gran Teatre del Liceu
Conducted by Josep Pons
Director
William Kentridge
Editors
Janus Fouché, Zana Marović, Joshua Trappler
Costume & Puppet Designer
Greta Goiris
Set and Model Designer
Sabine Theunissen
Cinematographer
Dǔsko Marović
Video Operator
Kim Gunning
Executive Producer
THE OFFICE performing arts + film
“O Sentimental Machine”
New project page now live on www.kentridge.studio
“Questions of machines and how they are used is an interest that has been explored in many ways. There are a lot of found objects in the studio that have been used for different projects to create sculptures, kinetic machines or mechanical objects. The megaphone is an obvious one because it’s about the multiplication and expansion of the voice. But a megaphone is also used because it’s one of the three figures that Cezanne describes as being necessary to describe the world, a sphere, a cylinder and a cone. And a megaphone is really just taking the idea of the form of a cone and putting that to work back in the world.
So there have been many megaphones in different projects. But there were other machines made in the last years that are still sitting in the storeroom. This was an attempt to see, could one control a megaphone? In fact one of the collaborators who worked with me on this project hacked into a Playstation Connect system so that he could do movements with his arms and these movements would control the control the movement of the megaphone, a bit like a Theremin. In other words there’s no visible connection but as your hands move you control how the megaphone moves.” WK
Take a detailed look at the making of the five channel film, “O Sentimental Machine”, originally made as a site specific installation at the Hotel Splendid on Büyükada Island, for the 14th Istanbul Biennale in 2015 and currently showing at LUMA Arles, as part of the exhibition, “Je n’attends plus”.
Actors
Sue Pam-Grant
William Kentridge
Musical composition & arrangement
Philip Miller
Video editing & construction
Žana Marović and Janus Fouché
Costume design
Greta Goiris
Director of photography
Duško Marović
Sound mix
Gavan Eckhart
Musicians
Voice
Joanna Dudley
Theremin
Janus Fouché
Bouzouki
Jannous Aukema
Piano
Philip Miller
“Mazi” composed by Necip Celal Andel, sung by Seyyan Hanım
Idiosyncratic lines of enquiry into particular aspects of studio practice or bodies of work
Stumbling to Utopia
“Why continue with these gestures, with these drawings, these words, in the face of their imminent failure? Because without some idea of utopia, of a rescued world implicit not just in these gestures but in the act of making a drawing, a performance, a speech – without this we feel a gap, a hollow.” WK, 2016
William Kentridge: Creative Machines
William Kentridge puts to use a diversity of ‘creative machines’ in making work. He methodologically rethinks drawing, as an unfinished process, a means of collecting and generating iconography, with the aim of maximizing narrative amplitude that goes beyond the limits of graphic representation by resorting to sound and cinematography.
Listening to the Trees
An anecdotal account of the making of the book “Waiting for the Sibyl” and a consideration of Kentridge’s ongoing series of tree drawings, by book designer Oliver Barstow
9 WORDS and one more
Making art is a uniquely human endeavour and an artist, the maker of art, is someone who distills what they feel and think about the world and expresses this visually. This requires one to read, to see, to listen, to feel, to question and be curious; to know, and yet to doubt; to have humility and to be brave.
All so different from what you expected
Things which are obvious in studio practice, like uncertainty, doubt, provisionality, are not about the COVID pandemic. They are themes I have worked on for many years – but these themes in the outside world have become much more present in these months.
Cursive
Cursive is the third set in a series of small bronze glyphs, following “Lexicon” (2017) and “Paragraph II” (2018). The glyphs started as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page from a dictionary.
