ART-PRESENTATION: William Kentridge-That Which We Do Not Remember

Considered one of the most powerful voices in art today, William Kentridge emerged as an artist during the apartheid regime in South Africa. Grounded in the violent absurdity of that period in his country’s history, Kentridge’s practice spans drawing, collage, animation, performance, theatre, tapestry and sculpture. Significant to the exhibition, a selection of artworks from the Naomi Milgrom Collection presents a union of art, ideology, history and memory formed throughout the artist’s career.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Art Gallery of South Australia Archive

William Kentridge’s solo exhibition “That Which We Do Not Remember” traces Kentridge’s 30-year career and draws connections between the myriad aspects of his work including drawing, collage, stop-motion animation, performance, theatre, tapestry and sculpture. The exhibition is installed as a series of intimate encounters. Visitors are invited to step into cork-lined pods for a transformative experience of the moving image. Also, Kentridge presents his working methods, with a re-creation of the his studio situated within the exhibition. The exhibition also traces the evolution of Kentridge’s subject matter, from the specific context of apartheid in South Africa to more universal stories and a range of human conditions. In recent years Kentridge’s thematic concerns have expanded to include his own studio practice, the Enlightenment and colonialism, and the cultural history of post-revolutionary Russia. This newer work is based on an intensive exploration of themes connected to Kentridge’s own life experience, as well as the social issues that most concern him. Using the original music of François Sarhan (with the composer himself in pantomime) and texts of Daniil Harms, William Kentridge’s “Telegrams from the nose” (2007), a 45 minute medium-format, between musical theatre, animated video images and installation. Evocation of the Stalinian 1920s in Russia: futurism and constructivism mix in with the minutes of the trial of Fiodor Bukharin. Disappearance, threat, and oppression are masked by the grotesque, the speed, the vitality: terror installs itself, but in a wave of frenzy and unbridled artistic imagination. On a canvas painted in the manner of an old magazine boasting the advances of science, Kentridge projects a turbulent theatre of human shadows that run towards the victory of the new man. Sarhan’s music, modern sky at will, precipitates the race. But the representation gets out of control: at any moment, censure interrupts. “Secondhand Reading” (2013) is composed of hundreds of drawings superimposed on pages from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and other lexicons and encyclopedias. Like figures on a stage, drawings of the artist, scenes from nature, geometric shapes and phrases dance to music by Neo Muyanga across a backdrop of definitions and classifications. These rational sequences of words are counterpoised with the intuitive and the imaginary.

Info: Curator: William Kentridge, Art Gallery of South Australia, North Terrace, Adelaide, Duration 6/7-8/9/19, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, www.agsa.sa.gov.au