Latest news with #WilliamKentridge
The Citizen
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Grace Kotze exhibit at Art in the Country
EVERY brush stroke and paint drop matters for renowned Durban artist Grace Kotze who is preparing to showcase her self-curated work at the Art in the Country 2025 at Harrington House, Hilton, from May 22 to 25. Fresh from her showcase at the Clarens Arts Festival in early May, the painter remains focused on perfecting her work which will be viewed by scores of patrons and art enthusiasts at the popular arts fair in Hilton. Kotze, who finds the 'vibrancy and activity of the city very energising and inspirational' said for her, art provides a process which forms stability and enlightenment. Though versatile in her work, Kotze draws inspiration from everyday life and surroundings, 'painting from an emotional point of reference'. The Messages of Life and The elephant and the play dough painter said her art is on an autobiographical level, documenting both her internal and external vision. Also Read: Local artist captures the spirit of the Comrades in vibrant mural 'As unrelated as my works may appear, they speak very directly to the process of living and loving the world which we inhabit,' said Kotze who took up art at a young age. 'At school, dyslexia limited my choices and it was a natural transition that I gravitated towards image making. I am influenced by many of the same artists but have furthered my influences with the opening up of the world through social media.' She lists South African contemporary artist William Kentridge and Rembrandt as being among those that she looks up to within the industry that Kotze says is thriving nationally, but shrinking in Durban. 'William Kentridge is a local artist whose ambition, skill, creativity and prolific nature is absolutely inspirational,' said Kotze. 'Rembrandt was an artist whose emotional and technical virtuosity has never been rivalled, he is a constant inspiration.' With digital age and social media dominating most industries, the painter believes there is still room for young artists to thrive and grow. 'The Durban art scene is definitely shrinking but there will always be a place for fine art,' said Kotze. Her advice to up and coming artists is, 'Work, work, work then work some more! Hone your craft and never underestimate how long that will take. Be open to criticism and grow a very thick skin.' Also Read: Local art exhibition puts spotlight on human injustices Some of Kotze's pieces that will be on dispaly at Art in the Country include 'Symphony in yellow', 'The doughnuts and cat', 'Exhale' and her favourite, 'Darwin's perch'. She said, ''Darwin's perch' is my favourite as it is serious and humorous at the same time. I also like the fluidity of the paintwork and structural execution.' Dubbed KwaZulu-Natal's premier art exhibition, the Art in the Country fair will run from May 22 to 25 at Harrington House in Hilton. Kotze will be among 62 of SA's top artists that will showcase their best work in the Midlands with live music adding to the ambience. Opening hours from Thursday to Saturday are 09:00 to 20:00 and Sunday from 09:00 until 16:00. Entry fee is R30 per person, R20 for pensioners and R10 for scholars. For more information or to see other pieces by Kotze, visit or email gracekotze@ For more from Berea Mail, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram. You can also check out our videos on our YouTube channel or follow us on TikTok. Click to subscribe to our newsletter – here At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Korea Herald
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
William Kentridge returns with provocative works that ask rather than answer
South African visual artist and filmmaker's 'Sibyl' and 'Shostakovich 10' to be presented in Seoul in May This month, audiences in South Korea will once again encounter the haunting, layered world of the South African artist known for collapsing the boundaries between drawing, film, music and performance. Returning to Korea for the first time in nearly a decade, William Kentridge presents two of his recent works under the GS Arts Center's Artists series: "Sibyl," and multimedia symphonic project 'Shostakovich 10: Oh To Believe in Another World' (2024). These are not works that deliver answers. Rather, they raise questions that resonate long after the lights dim: 'What does it mean to confront death?' 'In whose land can someone be called 'illegal?'' 'What is the relationship of a composer to an authoritarian regime?' To be performed Friday and Saturday at the GS Arts Center, "Sibyl," a double bill comprising 'The Moment Has Gone' and 'Waiting for the Sibyl,' offers Kentridge's signature blend of visual art, performance and political commentary. 'They are like two short stories in a collection,' he said during a press conference Wednesday. 'From the same world, not narratively linked, but they are linked by performers and both confront death.' 'The Moment Has Gone,' a 22-minute film with live singers, unfolds across three dimensions: footage of Kentridge drawing in his studio, poetic evocations of Johannesburg's informal labor and the physical presence of the singers onstage. In contrast, 'Waiting for the Sibyl' transforms the ancient Roman myth of the Cumaean prophetess into a contemporary meditation on uncertainty. In the myth, seekers would write questions on oak leaves and leave them at the Sibyl's cave, only to find that the wind had scattered their answers. 'You'd never know if you were getting your answer or someone else's,' Kentridge said. "The question of uncertainty, of not knowing one's fate, of what one's relationship was to one's death. These are all questions on the stage," he noted. Both "The Moment Has Gone" and "Waiting for the Sibyl" feature music by composer and associate director Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who also hails from South Africa. They described their creative partnership as one that brings a 'vertical' dimension to Kentridge's 'horizontal' practice. When they started working together Kentridge asked Mahlangu, "Can we find something that also goes down? So we've got the movement across, but to find music that winds down into our souls?" Their collaboration would often lead to robust conversations that revealed quite different experiences of growing up in the same city of Johannesburg, a city marked by stark racial and economic divides that persist long after the official end of apartheid. "('The Moment Has Gone') challenges the status quo and it challenges our lives. We are confronted with something very specific: that we grow up in the same city, experiencing different things within the same city. It is a work that puts us in a robust conversation," Mahlangu said. "And the robust conversation is the illegal miners, in whose land are they illegal?" On May 30, 'Shostakovich 10: Oh To Believe in Another World,' Kentridge's visual response to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, will be performed with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, led by conductor Roderick Cox. Projected behind the orchestra will be a film composed of cardboard models, cut-out masks and stop-motion imagery — a Constructivist visual universe that evokes Stalinist Russia. 'The symphony was first performed just months after Stalin's death,' Kentridge noted. 'Now we hear it as pure music, but it's important to understand the context in which it was made.' Characters such as revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky appear as cardboard silhouettes in a rusted, stiff puppet world. 'It becomes a kind of stuck history,' Kentridge said, 'with awkward, hard moves.' "While the music flows continuously, the visuals hold tension,' he added. Despite the political overtones, Kentridge resists the notion that his works preach. 'In many ways, the arts, whether it's with music and theater or image, it is a place where these different questions come together not with an answer but to be discovered in the activity of making,' he said. An official at the GS Caltex Arts Center explained that the two works were chosen to showcase contrasting aspects of Kentridge's artistry. ''Sibyl' best encapsulates William Kentridge's signature style,' the official told The Korea Herald. 'In contrast, the other piece presents a different facet of his work — it engages not with African music but with classical music, and the medium shifts from charcoal to paper. These contrasts were compelling, which is why we decided to include both works.' gypark@
Daily Maverick
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Kentridge — An artist's evocation of meaninglessness
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.
Los Angeles Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Commentary: How exuberant, ambitious operas in L.A. score big despite small casts and modest budgets
Los Angeles is no opera oasis in the sense of Berlin or Paris, which have nightly choices. Our opera comes and goes, fickle as flood-drought weather. Right now it's pouring chamber opera. February has, in fact, been something of an ad-hoc L.A. chamber opera festival. Last week alone, four premieres around town created an atmospheric river of chamber opera and opera-like works, home-grown and imported. All were different in musical and theatrical style and, somewhat, in intent. Importantly, all proved relevant, speaking to the moment in ways unique to the medium. For opera on a reduced scale — small casts, small instrumental ensembles, small spaces — intimacy replaces grandeur. Smaller budgets allow for bigger ideas. There is room for experimentation, immediacy and risk. Such opera can be done pretty much anywhere, indoors or outdoors, and pretty much anything goes. Better known for reinvention than status quo, L.A. is, in fact, a chamber opera town of renown. The ad-hoc festival began with a celebration of the Industry, the most impressive opera lab in America, and a wave goodbye to its founder, Yuval Sharon, who has taken the revolution to Detroit Opera, where he is artistic director, and to the Metropolitan Opera, where he will face the greatest challenge of his career attempting to mend the company's old Wagnerian ways with radical new productions of 'Tristan und Isolde' and the 'Ring' cycle. Next up, the Wallis in Beverly Hills hosted the U.S. premiere of a marvelously multimedia opera of ideas and imagery on the subject of exile. 'The Great Yes, the Great No' got a great big yes. It was created by William Kentridge at his South African opera lab, the Centre for the Less Good Idea. African and European musical forms, exuberant visual design and a wide-ranging text explored, with universal implications, the lasting ways deportation affects identity. Early on in its history, Long Beach Opera, originally Long Beach Grand Opera, found the 'grand' too ceremonious and increasingly scaled back to experimental, in-your-face intimacy. Last week the company presented its most radical performance ever to begin an audacious season completely composed of Pauline Oliveros productions. To call 'El Relicario de Los Animales' — an exercise in singers and instrumentalists expressing their inner animal — an opera may seem a stretch. But it happened to include a performance by a noted traditional mezzo-soprano, Jamie Barton, that already sets a high standard for operatic performance of the young year. The production began with Oliveros' 'Thirteen Changes,' a series of activities or images — standing naked in the moonlight, a singing bowl of steaming soup — with the extravagantly dressed performers in the nooks and crannies of Heritage Square. The reliquary itself, held in the square's church, was a series of exceedingly odd musical interactions between vocalists and the instruments in a combination of rap session and organized mystical service. The sounds, those seductively embracing and those frightfully howling in the wind, became an acknowledged life in all its strangeness, the animal kingdom as counselor to our uncertainties, indulgences and differences. This was also the week that Los Angeles Opera took its annual break from its grand pedestal at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and presented the West Coast premiere of another opera from Beth Morrison Projects at REDCAT. Mary Kouyoumdjian's 'Adoration' is an adaptation of Atom Egoyan's 2008 film in which a Canadian high school student of mixed race comes to terms with prejudice. Looking at reality through various cultural lenses, the deceptively elegant film is a nuanced deliberation on Simon's fantasy, planted in his imagination by his racist grandfather, that his Lebanese father was a terrorist. The opera, with a workable Royce Vavrek libretto, is less concerned with the issues than the characters and what's inside them, something opera is designed to do. The instrumental ensemble is but a string quartet. This is Kouyoumdjian's first opera, but she has been writing string quartet music of theatrical power for the past decade and has been championed by the Kronos Quartet. A new Kronos recording devoted to those works will be released in early March, and it features pieces with narration about war and peace in the Middle East that are grippingly theatrical. 'Adoration' feels like a natural next step. The string quartet conveys a mystical atmosphere. Her lyric vocal writing contends with harsh reality, but her style is never far from profound rapture. Unfortunately, the opera itself doesn't transcend other realities. Complex issues are simplified in Vavrek's libretto. An agile production directed by Laine Rettmer includes a stylish minimalist set by Afsoon Pajoufar and a fine cast headed by Omar Najmi as Simon. The string quartet and conductor Alan Pierson are hidden and amplification is overly loud, adding its own emotional emphasis. Egoyan, who wrote the appreciative liner notes for Kouyoumdjian's Kronos recording, is a talented opera director. May composer and director one day make an opera together. Coincidentally, the Kronos, with three new members, were in town last week at the Wallis for the Southern California premiere of Michael Abels' 'At War With Ourselves — 400 Years of You,' for string quartet, narrator and chorus. Abels is best known as a film composer ('Get Out,' 'Us,' 'Nope') but also has opera credentials, having shared a Pulitzer Prize with Rhiannon Giddens for 'Omar.' Here he elaborates, line by lyrical line, on an eloquent poem about social justice by Nikky Finney. Her expressive reading of it was as much song as speech. The L.A. chorus Tonality brought a sunlight that made the text flower. It would not be far-fetched to present this as exalted music theater. Lastly, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo gave the world premiere last weekend (with a repeat this coming Saturday and Sunday) of Daniel Kessner's 'The Camp' at the Aratani Theatre. This was the most traditional of all the chamber operas. Its sentimental and rhyming libretto by Lionelle Hamanaka follows a Japanese American family during their World War II incarceration, leaving little room for meaningful music. But the story is moving in its treatment of how different generations dealt with tradition in a hostile environment. 'The Camp' has many advantages. Kessner, an L.A. composer and flutist, elevates the drama with pastoral beauty and serene tenderness. Set designer Yuri Okahana-Benson's skeleton structure in the modestly unfussy production evokes the kind of sets that Isamu Noguchi once designed for Martha Graham. These are well suited for Kessner's Copland-esque score (with subtle Japanese bits) for a superb mixed chamber ensemble conducted by Steve F. Hofer. Diana Wyenn's direction, suavely natural, never intrudes. The large cast is led by the compelling baritone Roberto Perlas Gómez as Mas Shimono, the father whose world crumbles around him as he tries to maintain traditional values. Kessner's opera, too, holds on to traditional opera values in a changing world and makes them and chamber opera matter.
Korea Herald
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
GS Arts Center in Seoul to open April with American Ballet Theatre show
Located in former LG Arts Center in southern Seoul, new performing arts center to focus on interdisciplinary artists 'GS Arts Center is looking for its audience,' said Sunny Park, CEO of the soon-to-open GS Arts Center, at a press conference on Tuesday. The new performing arts venue, poised to raise its curtain in April, occupies the former home of LG Arts Center Yeoksam, which relocated to Magok in 2022. It is housed within GS Tower, near Yeoksam Station in Seoul's Gangnam District. With a remodeling budget of 32 billion won ($22 million), the venue has slightly expanded its seating capacity from 1,103 to 1,211 and upgraded backstage facilities, all while preserving the center's core structure. American Ballet Theatre will open the new GS Arts Center April 24-27 with "American Ballet Theatre: From Classic to Contemporary," which combines two mid-length ballets with gala-style excerpts, offering the audience a diverse repertoire. All five Korean dancers at the company -- principal dancers Seo Hee and Ahn Joo-won, soloists Park Sun-mi and Han Sung-woo and Seo Yoon-jung from the corps de ballet -- will join ABT's 13 other principal dancers for the performances. William Kentridge, Marcos Morau for curated series The key initiative of the GS Arts Center's programming is its annual "Artists" series spotlighting two to three multidisciplinary creators each year for an in-depth exploration of their work. Blurring the boundaries between music, dance, theater and media art, the series will showcase artists whose work defies categorization, offering audiences a multidimensional experience. 'We hope this will be more than just a venue. We want it to be a space that shapes the flow of contemporary culture,' Park said. 'We seek to present artists in a way that highlights not only their artistic imagination but also how their experiences and ideas intersect across genres.' South African visual artist and director William Kentridge and Spanish contemporary choreographer Marcos Morau are leading the inaugural edition, both known for their genre-defying, interdisciplinary work. One of the world's foremost contemporary artists, Kentridge is known for his work across charcoal drawings, prints, sculpture, opera and tapestry. Two of his quintessential productions will soon arrive in Seoul. "Sibyl" is set to run May 9-10. It will include a short film with live music, "The Moment Has Gone," and the visually striking chamber opera "Waiting for the Sibyl." "Oh To Believe in Another World: Shostakovich 10," which combines Kentridge's signature visuals with Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10, will be staged May 30. Marking the 50th anniversary of the composer's passing. The production will feature a live performance by the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. Three works by choreographer Morau, who creates worlds and imaginary landscapes where movement and image converge and transform into one another, are coming to Seoul, also in May. The Ballet Nacional de Espana's "Afanador," slated for April 30–May 1, blends traditional flamenco with contemporary staging and black-and-white photography-like mise-en-scene. "Pasionaria," scheduled for May 16-18, a hallmark of Morau's visionary imagination, will be performed by his dance company La Veronal, while "Totentanz – Morgen ist die Frage" (also known as "Dance of Death") starts at GS Arts Center's lobby May 17-18, extending it into an immersive art space. Ballet, jazz and musicals The GS Arts Center will also collaborate with the Korean National Ballet on the Kylian Project in June, a triple bill of Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian's 'Forgotten Land,' 'Falling Angels' (Korean premiere) and Sechs Tanze." In addition, the Seoul Jazz Festival will bring a theater edition to the venue, presenting jazz legends such as Pat Metheny, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Marcus Gilmore in an intimate indoor setting. Looking ahead to the fall season, the Broadway musical "The Great Gatsby" arrives in late July. The musical, which premiered last year and is set for London's West End in April, is produced by the Korean production company, OD Company. Additionally, the Olivier Award-winning stage adaptation of "Life of Pi" will be staged in November.
