The Royal Academy’s recent William Kentridge exhibition is a tour de force, it’s a powerful mixture of deep introspection and Dada-esque humour. I was fortunate to have a tour of with the curator, Adrian Locke, and wanted to share my thoughts on the show.
As an artist myself, I’ve always been in awe of William Kentridge’s powerful and beautifully executed charcoal drawings and films. However, I was not aware of the extent of his artistic breadth, scale and vision; Upon entering the exhibition one is immediately struck by both Kentridge’s prolific output across mediums and by the immense size of his work. The exhibition takes you on the artist’s lifelong journey of self reflection as a white man, his critique of the world we share, as well as exploring the inner and outer turmoil of living in South Africa. Through the exploration of the depths of human pain, injustice, privilege, and conflict there are fleeting but ever present symbols of hope and light.
Both myself and my husband have South African heritage. We have a complex, powerful and deep rooted relationship with the country, and as our children have both black and white African ancestors, we make it a priority to take them there as regularly as we can. It is my experience that most of us in the UK are not forced in our daily lives to face up to our shared history of racism, colonialism and violence. In South Africa the weight of history is carried daily. Kentridge’s work is about the impossibility of erasing or forgetting apartheid in South Africa. As a white, British woman, I think many of us in the UK have been privileged, we are not forced to face up to our shared history of racism, colonialism and violence. In South Africa, the internal and external conflicts of race are so much more overt and inescapable. The embodied experience of racism and the weight of history is carried in people’s daily lives. I was so struck by the gallery of animated films, I could have sat and watched his gallery of animated films for days as the images emerged and vanished; the memories, dreams, and realities ebbing and flowing until they almost became mine as well.
I have explored in my own work the mixed heritage identity of my family and how we understand dualities within ourselves. Kentridge’s work grapples with these issues, as he interrogates notions of self and other. The commanding vastness of Kentridge’s drawings, tapestries, and video installations is juxtaposed by their simultaneous impermanence. Kentridge’s work exists in the grey areas and the blurring of boundaries, and presents a challenge to the absoluteness of the oppressive gaze. Kentridge draws over and erases images again and again, but even when one image disappears, it leaves a trace; it’s impossible to erase or forget.
At the end of the show we see Kentridge’s experimentation with Indian ink in the form of gestural and expressive renderings of trees. The South African landscape was integral to the construction of the settler colonial myth. Kentridge has described the landscaping paintings of Jacob Hendrik Pierneef as ‘documents of dismembering’. He reminds us that it's impossible to sever the connection between memory and landscape. In a show packed with such intense political and personal scrutiny, the trees create a space for reflection. They root the story back into nature, reminding us that every human being originally comes from mother Africa; encouraging us to contemplate what it means to be human.
