Friday, 5 August 2016

William Kentridge in Berlin

William Kentridge: Charcoal and ink on paper with traces of red pencil

I was over in Berlin this last week and had a chance to go and see the William Kentridge exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau; ‘No it is!’. Kentridge has long been an interest of mine as he covers a wide range of approaches to making drawn visual narratives and is not afraid to reflect on the political realities of his homeland and the contemporary fraught world of global capital and the anxieties it creates. His work can also be read allegorically and seeks to distil personal feelings into works that strive to achieve mythic stature.
This was a comprehensive examination of his animation work as well as his filmed performative pieces. Alongside this focus on moving image were also two galleries devoted to drawings, prints and models.
By working between disciplines he is able to extend his narratives and to open them out into much wider contexts. He has been able to work with composers, dancers, actors, as well as engineers and technicians to develop immersive environments composed of several projections and/or objects and moving constructions.

Models

Always drawing led, he has developed a comprehensive catalogue of characters, objects and landscapes that can be used as images in their own right, as models and sculptures that can be used as props and to create shadow plays, or within animations and performances where they are brought into ever changing relationships with each other, that allow original stories or implied associations to become renewed and opened out into new emerging narratives. Every time I get to see a Kentridge exhibition it seems as if he has added another element to his repertoire, this time working with musicians to compose scores that add emotional depth to the filmic experience. He was also layering his projection work much more, using animated drawings for backgrounds and a mixture of live footage and shadow play to develop his themes. 

From: 'More Sweetly Play the Dance’

In ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’, by using the device of a procession he was able to let all his characters parade in front of the audience. This 40-foot ‘frieze’ film of slowly progressing shadowy figures walking to a haunting tune played by a brass brand, is a sort of dance macabre that includes skeletons, people pulled along on platforms, dancers, people on medical drips, in cages and a walking pair of dividers. People might be fleeing their homes or escaping hunger, floods, poverty or war, they are from everywhere and anywhere, their dark forms moving through a raw stripped down landscape of and from any-when.  


On the 21st of September William Kentridge comes to the Whitechapel Gallery in London for the exhibition ‘Thick Time’. The exhibition will be composed of 6 large-scale installations; I am really looking forward to being able to see more of his work and if you didn’t see his major show at Marion Goodman, or haven’t been able to get to Berlin recently, then I do recommend you getting down to London before the 15th of January 2017 when it ends.

Still from a Kentridge animation

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