Kentridge — An artist's evocation of meaninglessness

Daily Maverick

21-04-2025

Inspired mostly by the Dadaists, William Kentridge's latest exhibition plays with the absurd.
William Kentridge's solo exhibition, To Cross One More Sea, was a multimedia showcase displayed at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, with drawings, puppets, prints, sculpture and a three-channel film. The 19-minute projection explored a part-historical, part-fictional ocean journey of artists, particularly surrealists, who fled Vichy France in the early 1940s.
The artworks reflect the artist's unique sensibilities and his decades of experience, which show his evolving expertise with certain materials. As always, he wittily intertwines the everyday with the political to give power to his themes – forced immigration, colonialism, despotic power – often combining images of historical figures with modern environments.
Kentridge has often claimed to have wanted to be an actor, but that he was not accepted in the field. As an artist, his charcoal film productions involve him as an actor of sorts and as a director of theatre actors, so I suppose he got his wish in the end.
Bronze sculptures and puppets
Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Still Life: Her Sleep Was Everything) enters into dialogue with Kentridge's film series that debuted during the Venice Biennale in spring 2024 and is now streaming on the platform Mubi. It is an invitation to the artist's studio, offering a glimpse into his key processes and methods.
Aphorism and Aviary, displayed for the first time in this exhibition, are sculptural works that continue Kentridge's exploration of symbolism and language through a series of bronze glyphs, which will be a key element of his Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo show in June.
New in the series and following Cursive (2020), Lexicon (2017) and Paragraph II (2018), these small bronzes began as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-out silhouettes, and then, as Kentridge put it, he took 'something as immaterial as a shadow and gave it heft'.
This continuing exploration includes a repertoire of everyday objects or implied words and icons, many of which have appeared in previous projects. The sequence of glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences that give a glimpse of 'the possibility of meaning in their order', which can then be denied and reconstructed when they are rearranged.
Some sculptures are enormous – to be displayed outside – while others are mid-sized, and still others are tiny. All possess a gestural simplicity that reminds me of Pablo Picasso's Cubism.
Several new puppets, made with costume designer Greta Goiris and crafted from old tools and found materials, draw a connection between the exhibition and Kentridge's expansive five-channel projection, Oh To Believe in Another World.
The film, made in response to Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 10, interweaves a series of images and narratives set in a cardboard model of an imagined Soviet museum. The story covers the events from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the death of Stalin in 1953.
Mixing human, object and animal
In To Cross One More Sea, Kentridge continues his use of the puppet as a performative object to relay complex stories. The character of each puppet emerges from working with the form of the tools and found materials to create an anthropomorphic figure.
They reminded me of the strange Cubist costume once worn by the founder of the Dada movement, Hugo Ball, when he performed his abstract poetry. Though there are unique elements, the puppets maintain hints of Kentridge's typical technique.
The print section of the exhibition is also reminiscent of the works of the Dadaists. The images are collaged on top of scripts with figures mixed with objects and animals, all of which play with scale. Some are images of land and old urban cityscapes.
The collages appear jumbled and seem never to arrive at a clear message, hinting at the surrealists' evocation of meaninglessness. DM
Bongo Mei is an artist and curator.