This collection of drawings, made for the films Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, Stereoscope, Tide Table, Other Faces, City Deep and What will come, has already come, focuses on Kentridge’s use of architecture in order to establish place within the … View…
2000 to 2009
2000
WORK
Creates Stair Procession, long-term installation, for the “Vertical Painting” series, MoMA PS1, New York
EXHIBITIONS
William Kentridge: Procession (solo), Annandale Galleries, SydneyWilliam Kentridge (solo), Stephen Friedman Gallery, LondonWilliam Kentridge: New Work (solo), … View…
The siren rises in a long wail. It climbs through the darkness, sounding the alarm that The Head & the Load has begun. At first, the tinny signal of distress seems to emanate from a machine, but as it swells, … View…
To contemplate the work of William Kentridge is to be captivated by its immediately obvious formal beauty, exquisite handling, pronounced attention to detail and the delicate rhythm with which the artist develops his ideas, which arise, evolve and establish themselves … View…
CABINET
Stumbling to Utopia
Robin Petersen
August 2023
William Kentridge’s lecture given at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London in October 2016, and entitled Enough and More than Enough: Performing the Drawing contains … View…
Programme note for first performances of Oh To Believe in Another World, at the KKL in Lucerne, June 2022.
How to make a film to accompany a live orchestral performance of a symphony?There are already 80 musicians in … View…
During the successive COVID lockdowns in 2020, I was fortunate enough to work on the making of the book Waiting for the Sibyl by William Kentridge. Fortunate, in the first instance, to have work when many others did not, and … View…
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 … View…
1990 to 1999
1990
WORK
Makes Monument, 16mm, video transfer, 3:11 min, second animated film in series Drawings for Projection
EXHIBITIONS
William Kentridge: Drawings and Graphics (solo), Cassirer Fine Art and Gallery on The Market, JohannesburgWilliam Kentridge: Drawings… View…
Text extracted from conversations between William Kentridge and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2020, and from other text spoken or written by William Kentridge in 2020.Over the last five months, it has a been a quiet and productive period inside … View…
Libretto compiled from original text; lines from poets translated from Finnish, Hebrew, Spanish, Greek, Polish, Russian and German; and renderings of African proverbs.
First curtainScene 1Old Gods have retiredI no longer believewhat I once believed.Read … View…
I came to know Alexander Calder’s work in reverse. First I had seen some gouaches in the house of friends of my parents. Later on I discovered the extraordinary mobiles, and from those discovered his earliest, and in many ways, … View…
The music for Triumphs and Laments is inspired by the masses of migrants trudging across Europe and the images we carry of them: mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, and friends dragging their scant belongings from a place of terrible violence … View…
In my studio in Johannesburg we made a cardboard cupboard (I’d just seen an exhibition of the works of the Polish director, Tadeusz Kantor). In this cupboard we placed two actors (in gasmasks) throwing a doll (with a gasmask) back … View…
Extracts from Footnotes for the Panther, Conversations between William Kentridge and Denis Hirson. Kentridge, William and Denis Hirson. Johannesburg, Fourth Wall. 2017.
DH: Could you say something about how it was that you came to work in charcoal? WK… View…
Published in William Kentridge: Thick Time. Iwona Blazwick and Sabine Breitwieser, Whitechapel Gallery: London, pp. 225-231.
At the 14 th Istanbul Biennial in 2015, entitled saltwater: Theory of Thought Forms, William Kentridge surprised audiences with a new cinematographic … View…
Wits Art Museum, 18 November 2015 – 14 December 2015The tapestries woven after William Kentridge’s designs looked custom-made for the Wits Art Museum. The elegantly minimalist gallery preserved something of the objects’ place of birth, so that “what happened … View…
Roman Heads. The title comes from looking at some Roman busts, or portrait sculptures. This done with a view to finding images for the Triumphs & Laments project for the Tiber River in Rome. At the moment all that remains … View…
RECALIBRATIONI was invited by the Metropolitan Opera to direct a production of Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu. I turned down the invitation. I didn’t have a solution for working on an opera that was four hours long. The charcoal … View…
A projection on a ceiling. Audience members can see the images leaning their heads back, looking up; or look down into small mirrors they each hold. The archive of images held in the air can be brought down to the … View…
Denise Wendel: Your first opera production, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse by Monteverdi, was a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company (1), produced 1998 in with Bernard Foccroulle and the KunstenFestivaldesArts in Brussels. This was followed by a further collaboration featuring … View…
Nikolai Gogol wrote his short story, The Nose in 1837.A man wakes up to find his nose gone. After ten pages of hunting for his nose, having it returned, trying to reattach it to his face, despairing, and then … View…
Stephen Inggs:Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It’s my privilege and pleasure to welcome William here this evening. It’s a great honour to have William, and to be able to introduce him. He’s no stranger to Hiddingh Hall, having previously … View…
Isis TragédieWhen does the tour start?I’d like to see theterracottas,the monuments,the marbles,the sarcophagithe death masksthe sar cophafa copha copha copha cophathe sarcophagi.I met a traveller from an antique landI … View…
A man wakes one morning and finds his nose gone. He attempts to track it down through the streets of his city, going to the police, placing newspaper advertisements for its return, seeking medical advice. When he does meet his … View…
Sarastro, the high priest in Mozart’s Magic Flute guides the hero of the opera in his journey towards wisdom. As a symbol of the enlightenment, Sarastro combines all knowledge with all power. In the two hundred and fifteen years since … View…
Walking, thinking, stalking the image. Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forwards across the space gathering the energy, the clarity to make the first mark. It is not so much a … View…
Shadow Procession was made in two sections, each one for a specific event. The first part to be made (the last section of the film) was conceived to be projected onto the front wall of a museum on the opening … View…
The films of Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum were all made with theprinciple of NO SCRIPT, NO STORYBOARD. The making of each film wasthe discovery of what each film was. A first image, phrase or idea wouldjustify … View…
BreatheWe forget the punch line of a story. Or remember the punch line, but forget the trajectory towards it. A corollary to this: some things, which have very clear starting points, go astray on their journey and are lost … View…
The TapestriesSince 2001, William Kentridge has completed a series of seventeen tapestries, each in multiple copies or versions. They originate in the artist’s collages of black silhouettes cut and glued over reproductions, mostly from nineteenth-century geographical atlases. The weavers … View…
Jonathan Wilson:In your talk at the Guggenheim Museum last year you spoke of a dangerous idea that inheres in The Magic Flute, “the whole opera is full of the metaphor of moving out of darkness into the light” but, … View…
Director’s note for The Magic Flute, first written in 2005 for the première at La Monnaie in Brussels, and updated for a revival of the opera at the New National Theatre in Tokyo in 2018.
The production of The … View…
Much of what I will be discussing here has to do with the nature of shadows, which I see as an important preliminary consideration for Black Box / Chambre Noire. Approximately two years ago a solar eclipse could be … View…
Introductory essay toWilliam Kentridge, book prepared on the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, 10 January to 29 February 2004; K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 27 March to … View…
Day for NightWe have had a summer plague of ants in Johannesburg, thin trails of them exploring different shelves of the kitchen every night, a syrup stain on a breadboard, a moving black patch in the morning. Examining one … View…
Guido: “My dear Zeno, I am the most intelligent man in Trieste. You are the fifth most intelligent. Positions two, three, and four are vacant.”When I first read Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno some twenty years ago, one of … View…
Zeno and PlatoThe theatre project Confessions of Zeno will be presented in Berlin shortly. To give you some orientation. At an angle across the stage will be a large screen – around 20 feet by 14 feet. On which … View…
Introductory essay toWilliam Kentridge, book prepared on the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 15 May to 23 August 1998; Kunstverein München, 28 August to 11 October 1998; Neue Galerie … View…
For some time now I have been drawing and using in my films, pictures based on different body imaging techniques. These range from X-rays to CAT- and sonar scans, and magnetic resonance images. While these images themselves have not been … View…
For many years I had made animated films which had been seen by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, and they had made puppet theatre which I had seen. We said – let’s see what happens … View…
I wanted to show a shredding machine on stage. But a real machine, noisily and slowly going through reams of paper, did not seem very remarkable. We thought of using a bread-slicer instead, as a metaphor, but were daunted by … View…
Introduction.I am an artist living and working in South Africa. I have mainly worked with static, two-dimensional images, but have been working since the late 1980s on a series of short films which I term Drawings for Projection. Their … View…
Director’s note for Woyzeck on the Highveld, first written in 1992 for the première at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg; updated for a revival performed in many cities in Europe, 2009-2013.
In the strange, convoluted world of oppression and … View…