Ink Rats
Current Events
Group Exhibition
Tuning In – Acoustique de l’émotion
October 3, 2024 – August 25, 2025
Foundation of the International Red
Cross and Red Crescent Museum,
Geneva
Solo exhibition
A Shadow of a Shadow
September 28 – December 8, 2024
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
Bait Al Serkal Arts Square
Forthcoming Events
Group Exhibition
The True Size of Africa
November 9, 2024 – August 17, 2025
Völklinger Hütte, Völklingen
A sporadic record of what happens in the studio, in video, words and images
OPENING TONIGHT
“OH TO BELIEVE IN ANOTHER WORLD”
A film by William Kentridge for Shostakovich Symphony
No. 10
Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona
18 & 19 October, 2024
Performed by Orquestra Simfònica del Gran Teatre del Liceu
Conducted by Josep Pons
Director
William Kentridge
Editors
Janus Fouché, Zana Marović, Joshua Trappler
Costume & Puppet Designer
Greta Goiris
Set and Model Designer
Sabine Theunissen
Cinematographer
Dǔsko Marović
Video Operator
Kim Gunning
Executive Producer
THE OFFICE performing arts + film
“O Sentimental Machine”
New project page now live on www.kentridge.studio
“Questions of machines and how they are used is an interest that has been explored in many ways. There are a lot of found objects in the studio that have been used for different projects to create sculptures, kinetic machines or mechanical objects. The megaphone is an obvious one because it’s about the multiplication and expansion of the voice. But a megaphone is also used because it’s one of the three figures that Cezanne describes as being necessary to describe the world, a sphere, a cylinder and a cone. And a megaphone is really just taking the idea of the form of a cone and putting that to work back in the world.
So there have been many megaphones in different projects. But there were other machines made in the last years that are still sitting in the storeroom. This was an attempt to see, could one control a megaphone? In fact one of the collaborators who worked with me on this project hacked into a Playstation Connect system so that he could do movements with his arms and these movements would control the control the movement of the megaphone, a bit like a Theremin. In other words there’s no visible connection but as your hands move you control how the megaphone moves.” WK
Take a detailed look at the making of the five channel film, “O Sentimental Machine”, originally made as a site specific installation at the Hotel Splendid on Büyükada Island, for the 14th Istanbul Biennale in 2015 and currently showing at LUMA Arles, as part of the exhibition, “Je n’attends plus”.
Actors
Sue Pam-Grant
William Kentridge
Musical composition & arrangement
Philip Miller
Video editing & construction
Žana Marović and Janus Fouché
Costume design
Greta Goiris
Director of photography
Duško Marović
Sound mix
Gavan Eckhart
Musicians
Voice
Joanna Dudley
Theremin
Janus Fouché
Bouzouki
Jannous Aukema
Piano
Philip Miller
“Mazi” composed by Necip Celal Andel, sung by Seyyan Hanım
OPENING TODAY
ARTE POVERA
Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection
October 9, 2024 - January 20, 2025
An exhibition curated by @carolynchristovbakargiev
“L’esprit d’escalier” is a site-specific wall installation made for the exhibition with the assistance of @marinefleurystudio and with the support of @liarummagallery, @hauserwirth and @goodman_gallery
OPENING TODAY
A SHADOW OF A SHADOW
Sharjah Art Foundation
Bait Al Serkal, Arts Square
28 September–8 December 2024
“A Shadow of a Shadow” is a survey of 17 performances created by Kentridge from the late 1980s to the present, from his interpretations of Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”, to Kentridge’s original works such as “The Head & the Load”. On view are objects and artworks produced for the development and presentation of these performance projects: drawings, stage backdrops, animations, puppets, props, costumes and installations.
Exhibition design by @sabine.theunissen
Video: An outdoor installation of the eight channel, panoramic film “More Sweetly Play the Dance” (2015), Arts Square, Bait al Serkal, Sharjah
Idiosyncratic lines of enquiry into particular aspects of studio practice or bodies of work
Stumbling to Utopia
“Why continue with these gestures, with these drawings, these words, in the face of their imminent failure? Because without some idea of utopia, of a rescued world implicit not just in these gestures but in the act of making a drawing, a performance, a speech – without this we feel a gap, a hollow.” WK, 2016
William Kentridge: Creative Machines
William Kentridge puts to use a diversity of ‘creative machines’ in making work. He methodologically rethinks drawing, as an unfinished process, a means of collecting and generating iconography, with the aim of maximizing narrative amplitude that goes beyond the limits of graphic representation by resorting to sound and cinematography.
Listening to the Trees
An anecdotal account of the making of the book “Waiting for the Sibyl” and a consideration of Kentridge’s ongoing series of tree drawings, by book designer Oliver Barstow
9 WORDS and one more
Making art is a uniquely human endeavour and an artist, the maker of art, is someone who distills what they feel and think about the world and expresses this visually. This requires one to read, to see, to listen, to feel, to question and be curious; to know, and yet to doubt; to have humility and to be brave.
All so different from what you expected
Things which are obvious in studio practice, like uncertainty, doubt, provisionality, are not about the COVID pandemic. They are themes I have worked on for many years – but these themes in the outside world have become much more present in these months.
Cursive
Cursive is the third set in a series of small bronze glyphs, following “Lexicon” (2017) and “Paragraph II” (2018). The glyphs started as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page from a dictionary.
