ART AND HUMAN RIGHTS:
WITNESSING TO SILENCE

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Drill Hall Gallery

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955 and continues to live and work there. He studied fine art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976-78) after graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand of Johannesburg with a B.A. in Politics and African Studies (1976). During 1981-82 Kentridge also undertook a course in mime and theatre at L'Ecole Jacques LeCoq in Paris and has been active in film and theatre productions as a writer, director, actor and stage director. He was a founding member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, based in Johannesburg and Soweto from 1975 to 1991, and also assisted in establishing the Free Filmmakers Cooperative in Johannesburg in 1988. Since 1992 he has collaborated with Handspring Puppet Company creating multimedia pieces with puppets, live actors and animation that have won numerous theatre awards.

Kentridge has gained an international reputation for his distinctive animated short films, which feature his dark and unsettling charcoal drawings. In his work Kentridge has focused on apartheid in South Africa, reflecting on the human tendency to relegate such atrocities to the place of forgotten histories. Often using the principal character of Soho Eckstein, an entrepreneur living in Johannesburg, Kentridge's films reflect on collective and individual responsibility in relation to acts of violence and injustice. Commenting on his works, Kentridge has said, 'I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and certain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.'

While Kentridge has moved between media in his artistic career, drawing remains the focus of his practice, with the artist regarding his film and stage projects as extensions of his drawing. Kentridge has exhibited his work widely since the 1980s, including in Art from South Africa at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1993, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Croc del Sud at the 45th Venice Biennale, Africus, the first Johannesburg Biennale 1995, Jurassic Technologies Revenant (1996), the 10th Sydney Biennale, Documenta X and Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions (1997) at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico. In 1998, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels both presented solo shows of Kentridge's work, as did the Kunstverein München in Munich, followed by the Museu d'Arte Contemporani in Barcelona (1999), and the Serpentine Gallery, London (1999). In 2000, his film Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old was selected as one of 84 animated films in the programme Jewels of a Century. A survey show of Kentridge's work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 2001, and also travelled to New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. In May 2002 Kentridge was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art in Baltimore.

William Kentridge
Casspirs full of love 1989-2000
Etching (edition of 30)
Image courtesy Annandale Gallery

© Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003

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Last Modified: Fri, 06 Jun 2003