William Kentridge

Listen to the Echo

William Kentridge (born in 1955 in Johannesburg) is one of the world’s most renowned contemporary artists. He came to fame internationally at the end of the 1980s with his animated short films; in them, Kentridge both critically and very poetically explores South Africa’s past and its present. These films, which are based on large-format charcoal drawings, constitute the starting point of what has evolved into a wide-ranging oeuvre that encompasses drawings, prints, sculptures, and tapestries as well as opera productions and multimedia theatre plays. In his thematically interwoven works, Kentridge repeatedly addresses the question of justice, but also the relationship between the individual and society.

On the occasion of the artist’s 70th birthday, Museum Folkwang is hosting a major retrospective covering William Kentridge’s entire career with exhibits spanning more than four decades. One focus will be on the films from the Drawings for Projection series which deal with the rise and fall of Johannesburg and the difficult legacy of apartheid. Kentridge’s focus on European colonialism in Africa also plays an important role in the exhibition, particularly in the form of his drawing series Colonial Landscapes, the Porter tapestries and the mechanical miniature stage Black Box/Chambre Noire.

For many years now, William Kentridge has been creating his own pieces for music theatre, which he then elaborates into multimedia works; a prime example is To Cross One More Sea, a three-channel film installation about artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime by ship. Kentridge also appears in his own films. The 2024 film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot provides an amusing, in-depth insight into his thought and his studio as a place of creative artistic practice.

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden are showing Kentridge's work in three locations. At the centre of the exhibition is the artist's recurring preoccupation with the theme of procession as a metaphor for the pursuit of human change.
Further information on the exhibition venues, dates and thematic focuses in Dresden can be found at www.skd.museum

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