In KENTRIDGE’s cross-disciplinary, cross-media world of artistic creation, images are not merely background supporting characters for theatre or installations, but are seen as an important intermediary to understanding the world. Taking Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ as an example, he feels that the prisoners in the cave believed the shadows on the wall represented reality not because they were controlled by hallucinations, but because silhouettes projected onto walls by firelight were the beginning of mankind’s understanding of the meaning of the world.

Journey to the Moon

In City Deep, the “zama zama” miners and the landscape merge into artworks hanging in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, itself built during the heyday of gold mining in Johannesburg. Wandering the exhibition spaces is a deeply contemplative Soho Eckstein, gazing at the artworks and into vitrines. Towards the end of the film the gallery collapses in on itself, an imagined demise of an institution in a state of increasing dereliction.

City Deep

A journey into the mines provides a visual representation of a journey into the conscience of Kentridge's invented character, Soho Eckstein, the white South African property owner who exploits the resources of land and black human labour which are under his domain. Throughout the film the imagery shifts between the geological landscape underground inhabited by innumerable black miners and Soho's world of white luxury above ground. When Soho, breakfasting in bed, pushes down the plunger of his cafetière, its movement is transformed into a rapid descent through the tray, through the bed and into the mine-shaft. Here the miners' world of overwhelming misery is depicted in claustrophobic tunnels where they are trapped digging, drilling and sleeping, embedded in rock. Above ground, Soho sits at his desk in his customary pin-stripe suit and punches adding machines and cash registers, creating a flow of gold bars, exhausted miners, blasted landscapes and blocks of uniform housing.

Mine

History of the Main Complaint is the sixth film [of a] series and is based on twenty-one drawings. It was made shortly after the establishment in South Africa of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was set up to conduct a series of public hearings into abuses of human rights perpetrated during the apartheid era. The hearings, in which individuals told their stories of personal suffering, were held in order to make reparation for abuse and in the hope of creating reconciliation between peoples. The underlying theme of this film is a (self) recognition of white responsibility. This is played out through a 'medical' investigation into the body of Soho Eckstein, the white property-developing magnate and greedy-capitalist protagonist of most of the preceding films, which provides the starting point for a revelation of conscience. (tate.org.uk)

History of the Main Complaint

Drawing, literally, from the story of Daniel and Belshazzar, William Kentridge's film Weighing… and Wanting re-examines the legacy of Belshazzar's message in post-apartheid South Africa. While the political climate shared by Belshazzar's kingdom and apartheid-era South Africa is striking – in both, a ruling civilization relegates whole populations to subhuman status – Kentridge sets the scene of his film after the South African rule of oppression has been replaced by the ascent of the African National Congress. Left in the frame of apartheid's collapse is Kentridge's charcoal creation, Soho Eckstein, a former apartheid profiteer and businessman, contemplating the works of his own hand in the dissolution of love and in the building of industry.

Weighing... and Wanting

The film sees a businessman (the Soho Eckstein figure from Kentridge's earlier films) standing on a hotel balcony watching the waves. Time passes, as the sea rolls back andforth in endless repetitions. We as viewers observed from his point of view. Then the scene shifts to a large drawing of a man, still in his business suit but now alternately sleeping and reading a newspaper at the water's edge in a deck chair. The drawing is folded into a series of images that provide a visual mediation on time's passage, on industry, on ildeness.  Kentridge's work is often densely allusive, and here the film alludes to the Old Testament. The artist expressedly indicates that biblical accounts has informed his thinking. It is what he refers to as being 'over-determined' in that the motif arises from several distinct sets of meaning.

Tide Table

An outdoor performance and film screening that brings together all of the short animated films from internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge's Soho Eckstein series.

10 Drawings for Projection, 1989-2011

"Tango for Page Turning" belongs to a constellation of work created for "Refuse the Hour", a multimedia chamber opera conceived and written by Kentridge in collaboration with composer Philip Miller and fellow South African choreographer Dada Masilo.

Tango for Page Turning

Acclaimed artist William Kentridge directed and designed this visually dazzling Met premiere production of Shostakovich’s satirical opera, adapted from the classic short story by Nikolai Gogol. Baritone Paulo Szot leads the cast as Kovalyov, the hapless bureaucrat whose nose has mysteriously gone missing. Alexander Lewis and Andrey Popov co-star, and Pavel Smelkov conducts.