Kentridge: Thick Time

The exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents South African artist William Kentridge, who shows how much we are marked by mappings, concepts of time and ideology.

William Kentridge: Thick Time
A good 25 years ago Kentridge made his mark as a draughtsman with his short animated films dealing with the problematic history of apartheid in his home country. Using a characteristic stop-motion technique based on his charcoal drawings, which are still his characteristic works, he literally brings his drawings to life before the eyes of the viewer, so we can follow the genesis of the drawing and how it changes as things are rubbed out and drawn over, while the traces of the earlier versions of the drawing continue to be clear.
It is this technique – among other things – to which Kentridge refers when he talks about thick time – a kind of distillation or concentration of a temporal process. Drawing is still Kentridge’s primary medium and the starting point for his practice today, but it has become significantly more complex and multi-facetted over the years.

 

Louisiana’s exhibition focuses on a number of the artist’s late works from the period 2003–2016, whose anatomy marks a new departure in Kentridge’s oeuvre. In the course of the past 15 years a lifelong enthusiasm for theatre, opera, literature, film and music has culminated in a number of virtuoso installations where these arts are linked by moving images, words, music and stage design. The scene has been set, so to speak.

At the heart of Kentridge’s work is humanity: colonized, regulated, oppressed, fleeing or dreaming humanity. With great humour, empathy and poetry the works show how human beings navigate the world, and how much we are marked by and subject to mappings, concepts of time and ideology.

 

As an introduction to Kentridge’s universe the exhibition shows the ten films Drawings for Projection (1989–2011); as well as the computer-controlled puppet theatre Right Into Her Arms (2016), which has its origin in Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu; 7 Fragments for George Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon (2003), a nine-screen installation whose premiere was received with great enthusiasm by the reviewers at
the Venice Biennale in 2003; the work O Sentimental Machine (2015) referring to Leon Trotsky’s four-year exile on an island near Istanbul; the monumental procession of shadows More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), where the marginalized creatures of the world perform a dance of death before the viewer; the installation The Refusal of Time (2012), which was shown for the first time at Documenta in Kassel in 2012 and which forms part of the Louisiana Collection; and finally, a vital, poetic Kentridgian encyclopedia, the film Second-hand Reading (2013).

Besides the big installations and film works, the exhibition will include a wide range of sculptures, objects
and drawings. “William Kentridge – Thick Time” is co-produced in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, London, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Latest on News

Latest on Domus

Read more
China Germany India Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Sri Lanka Korea icon-camera close icon-comments icon-down-sm icon-download icon-facebook icon-heart icon-heart icon-next-sm icon-next icon-pinterest icon-play icon-plus icon-prev-sm icon-prev Search icon-twitter icon-views icon-instagram