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William Kentridge
Monument, 1990, 3:11 minutes
Mine, 1991, 5:49 minutes
Felix in Exile, 1994, 9 minutes
History of the Main Complaint 1996, 5:50 minutes
From the series "Drawings for Projection"
animated films on laserdisk
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Museum purchase, 96-34-1.7
This series of animated films are made from black and white charcoal drawings that the artist calls "drawings for projection." Born to a white, South African family in 1955, William Kentridge's nontraditional education included studies in drawing and theater as a teenager, and later, philosophy and politics in college. These aspects of the artist's background come together in his films, resulting in dramatic and disturbing commentaries on South Africa's tragic history of apartheid.
In creating films, Kentridge adds to or erases sections of drawings as he shoots each frame of the film. The process of memory, fading or reemerging as time passes, is reflected in the faint, ghost-like erasures still visible as the film unfolds. Kentridge's films contrast with conventional cell animation whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. The sketchy style of Kentridge's drawings is both evidence of the artist's "hand" as well as an expression of the emotional tension inherent in the subject matter.
The legacy of apartheid's race-based oppression is revealed in surreal, dream-like ways to a cast of fictional characters that represent oppressors, witnesses and victims. Soho Eckstein, a white, wealthy businessman, is haunted by the effects of his actions while his alter ego, the naked Felix Teitlebaum, is a pensive, vulnerable figure. Even the barren South African landscape itself is animated, scarred by mining debris and the blood of its black inhabitants. In Felix in Exile, Nandi, a black, female surveyor of this troubled landscape, is a metaphor for the daunting task of reconciliation and transition to a new future.
Michael Godby, "William Kentridge: Retrospective," Art Journal 58, no. 3 (1999): 75-85.
Leah Ollman, "William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures," Art in America 87, no. 1 (1999): 70-75, 113.
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