ART CITIES:London-William Kentridge
William Kentridge’s work spans across traditional media and techniques such as: tapestries, works on paper, sculptures, installations, animated films or opera productions that he directs. The exhibition “Thick Time”, though not a retrospective, combines all these multi-dimensional elements to produce assemblages that grapple with the concept of time, including sketches.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Whitechapel Gallery archive
Renowned for his animated expressionist drawings and films exploring time, the history of colonialism and the aspirations and failures of revolutionary politics, in “Thick Time” William Kentridge presents a body of work in which music and drama are ruptured by revolution, exile and scientific advancement. The exhibition presents six works created between 2003 and 2016, including two of the artist’s immersive audio-visual installations, “The Refusal of Time” (2012) and “O Sentimental Machine” (2003), which have never previously been exhibited in the UK. The exhibition will also feature his flip-book film, “Second-hand Reading” (2013), a series of mural-scale tapestries based on his opera production of Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and a set model which reveals his working process on the opera production “Lulu” (2016), which he will direct at English National Opera this November. “The Refusal of Time” (2012) is an all-enveloping, multi-sensory installation that explores the transformation of time into material objects, sound, images and mechanics. Inspired by a series of conversations between Kentridge and American scientist Peter Galison around theories of time, the work is an extraordinary synthesis of moving images, sound and performance. A breathing sculpture or ‘elephant’ at its heart is based on 19th Century attempts to measure and control time during the industrial revolution and high point of European colonial expansion. The work is a collaboration between the artist with composer Philip Miller, projection designer and editor Catherine Meyburgh, and Peter Galison. The exhibition concludes with “O Sentimental Machine” (2015), originally commissioned for 14th Istanbul Biennial, where it was installed in Hotel Splendid Palas. In a critique of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s notion that people are “Sentimental but programmable machines”, subtitled videos of speeches by Trotsky and also his time in exile in Istanbul are projected on to glass doors on either side of the installation, offering the viewer the opportunity to observe what is going on behind the closed doors.
Info: Curator: Iwona Blazwick and Sabine Breitwieser , Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, Duration 21/9/16-15/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.whitechapelgallery.org
