Museum Folkwang opens major exhibition William Kentridge. Listen to the Echo

With the exhibition William Kentridge. Listen to the Echo, Museum Folkwang is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to one of the most important contemporary artists. In cooperation with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, a double exhibition will be held in Essen from 4 September and in Dresden from 6 September 2025.

“Listening to the echo refers to being open to what comes towards you [...] it may be something that you feel in your body as an excitement, without being able to put your finger on what it is.” (William Kentridge, 2025)

From the 1980s onwards, William Kentridge (born in Johannesburg in 1955) has been exploring the political and social realities of his native South Africa in his work, addressing themes such as apartheid and the aftermath of colonial structures. His works combine personal narratives with global themes, creating a space for resonance that links both past and present.

With around 160 exhibits spanning five decades, the exhibition covers Kentridge’s entire artistic career. In addition to drawings and animated films, there are also prints, sculptures, tapestries and multichannel film installations on display. His cinematic works combine elements of feature films, documentaries and experimental films whilst occupying a unique position between these genres. Drawing, however, remains the decisive basis of his work. Kentridge’s visual language touches both the intellectual and the emotional.

The animated short films Drawings for Projection, which brought Kentridge international recognition early on and in which he takes a critical albeit poetic look at South Africa’s past and present, are one of the exhibition’s first highlights. Themes such as the rise and fall of Johannesburg, which experienced an enormous boom as a mining town after gold was discovered there in the late 19th century, draw parallels with industrial developments in Essen and the Ruhr region. The exhibition will be showing the films Mine (1991), Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), Other Faces (2011) and City Deep (2020). A selection of the artist’s large-format drawings created for these films will also be presented alongside the films.

The animated film Ubu Tells the Truth (1997) and the graphic series of the same name address apartheid, a central theme in 20th-century South African history, with echoes that can still be felt today. This also applies to the colonialism of European powers in Africa, including the German Empire, which plays an important role in the exhibition – for example, in the large-format series of drawings entitled Colonial Landscapes (1996/97) and the three-channel film installation KABOOM! (2017–2018). The latter addresses the African men, women and children who were forcibly conscripted by the colonial powers as porters during the First World War.

One of Kentridge’s major works is the mechanical miniature stage Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005). On loan from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, it is being shown in a German museum for the first time in many years. This work links the memory of the genocide perpetrated by German soldiers against the Herero in German South West Africa in 1904 with a pointed critique of the European Enlightenment, which Kentridge sees as having shaped colonialism.

Kentridge’s intensive engagement with literature, theatre and music is also reflected in the exhibition. The ambivalence of social utopias, which often turn into their opposites, has been a central theme for Kentridge ever since he staged Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2010. The 30-part etching series The Nose (2006–2009) and the lithographic collages Portraits for Shostakovich (2022) deal with the tensions between utopia and social reality in a multilayered way.

With recent works, the exhibition extends into the immediate present. The three-channel film installation To Cross One More Sea (2024) refers to the flight in March 1941 of some 350 people by ship from Marseille to Martinique in the Caribbean, including artists and intellectuals such as André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Germaine Krull. By adding further names to the passenger list, Kentridge detaches the work from its specific historical context and raises general questions about social participation and cultural self-empowerment.

The final exhibition room features the film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot – nine short films shot in the artist’s studio since 2020, in which Kentridge provides profound and entertaining insights into his artistic thinking and work. To this end, he engages in conversations with his doppelganger, with the two often contradicting each other. Kentridge addresses complex topics in a manner that is both concise and humorous.

The exhibitions in Dresden and Essen are being organised in close collaboration with William Kentridge. The joint exhibition catalogue (€38) is published by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen.

Information 
William Kentridge in Dresden and Essen 
Listen to the Echo 

Museum Folkwang: 4 September 2025 to 18 January 2026 
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden: from 6 September 2025 

Admission Museum Folkwang: €14 (regular) / €8 (reduced) 
 

The main Sponsor of the exhibition in Essen is:

RAG-Stiftung

The sponsors of the exhibition in Essen are:

Ministry of Culture and Science of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia

Sparkasse Essen

Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland

Kulturstiftung Essen

Folkwang-Museumsverein

Press images available at www.museum-folkwang.de and www.skd.museum/besucherservice/presse