13 Sep William Kentridge Survey Heads to Sharjah Art Foundation

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/william-kentridge-survey-heads-to-sharjah-art/

Emirati audiences will be introduced to the anti-authoritarian ideas underlying three decades of Kentridge’s work.

William Kentridge, the South African artist and theatre director whose performances and animations are known to critique South African society, will be the subject of a survey at Sharjah Art Foundation.

From 28 September to 8 December, Shadow of a Shadow will feature 17 of Kentridge’s performances from the late 1980s to today—predominantly his short animations and opera productions, alongside drawings, stage backdrops, animations, props, costumes, and installations.

The title nods to Kentridge’s long-time collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company in Cape Town, derived from a play by 13th-century Arab writer Ibn Daniyal, whose puppet shows often defied the status quo.

The exhibition is a surprising choice for the Emirati city given the humanitarian politics commonly ascribed to Kentridge’s work. The survey reconciles these views by focusing on the artist’s work in theatre, situating his commentary within the realm of art.

On view is Kentridge’s interpretation of King Ubu, Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play satirising how power can engender madness, as a metaphor for South Africa’s introduction of apartheid. Another work, The Head and the Load (2018), casts a light on Africa during World War I.

William Kentridge, ‘Rubrics’ (2012–2014). Individually titled prints, each silkscreen ink on paper. Each an edition of 16. Published by Artist Proof Studio, 2012. Printed by Cloudia Hartwig, assisted by Zweletu Machepa. Courtesy the artist.

Kentridge’s restaging of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), first shown in Brussels in 2005, on the other hand speaks to the artist’s fondness for the form as a site where ‘complex and deep questions can be played out’.

Born into an activist family in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955, Kentridge studied political science before pursuing visual art. In the early 1980s, he attended theatre school in Paris, where he learned directing and reconceptualised drawing as an expression of motion and energy.

The stop-motion films that earned him acclaim in the 1990s attested to this understanding of form and Kentridge’s fluid merging of mediums: theatrical narratives emerged from charcoal drawings, photographed and erased, addressing the impact of late capitalism in South Africa.

‘With the spectre of apartheid in South Africa, we’re dealing very much with colonialism’s continuation and ongoing questions of extreme privilege and extreme depravation,’ Kentridge told Ocula. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/william-kentridge-survey-heads-to-sharjah-art/