William Kentridge

The celebrated South African artist and theatre director, William Kentridge is internationally renowned for his animated films, which take the complex history of South Africa as their focus, and in particular the legacy of apartheid. His amazing range of animation techniques include the use of charcoal drawings, which are erased and re-worked for each individual frame so as to make a full-length film, as well as shadow puppets and cut-out silhouettes. Sometimes the films also incorporate documentary photographs and footage, set alongside cartoon figures, underlining the farce-like nature that even the historic and tragic events of South Africa can assume. Often contrasting the daily life of an individual with major historical events, Kentridge's films do not set out to tell the viewer what to think, but instead evoke a range of conflicting emotions that align us at one and the same time with the victims and the perpetrators of injustice. The films are often humourous and absurdist, reflecting on the insanity of an apartheid policy presented as a rational system of government.

This one-off presentation at Spacex Gallery, organized in association with the DCS Crossings project and Animated Exeter, includes the entire Soho Eckstein cycle, incorporating eight films made between 1989 and 1999, as well as three more recent full-length animated films. Alongside the film screenings, artist-in-residence Jenny Mellings, will work with local groups to produce an animated film focusing on everyday life in the city of Exeter, subsequently to be shown in April as part of the Homeland project. In 1989 Kentridge made Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, the first in a series of short animated films featuring three main characters, Soho Eckstein, a Johannesburg “property developer extraordinaire”, his dissatisfied wife, Mrs Eckstein, and her seducer, the artist Felix Teitlebaum, who is always pictured naked and “whose anxiety flooded half the house”. Subsequent films in the cycle, made over the following decade, continued to focus on the relational struggles of this ménage a trois, with the titles: Monument (1990), Mine (1991), Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996), WEIGHING… and WANTING (1998) and Stereoscope (1999). In the same time period, South Africa was undergoing massive political transformations, with Nelson Mandela released in 1990 and subsequently elected president in 1994, heralding a new post-apartheid democracy, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 1996. In the Soho Eckstein cycle, these public events form the backdrop to the turmoils of the three main protagonists. Soho Eckstein is always in a pinstriped suit and is a mine owner and building boss, an exploiter who poses as a philanthropist. In Monument (1990) he is concerned to have a monument raised to himself. He seems to be heading for no good end, as his technology appears to turn against him. In Mine (1991), ticker-tape, bearing messages from the stock exchange, winds round him like a python. He becomes a sick unconscious man in History of the Main Complaint (1996), and images of fear and guilt rise from his prostrate body. In Stereoscope (1999) he is taken captive by blue lines, which come out of telephones, tape-recorders, telegraph wires and loudspeakers, pierce walls and finally penetrate the whole city.

Ubu Tells the Truth (1997) differs from Kentridge’s preceding films in its use of cartoon-like caricature figures and the incorporation of documentary photographs and footage. This archival information is used to give context to the cartoon images, and ranges from images of police with whips lashing into a running crowd in Cato Manor in 1960, to footage from the Soweto uprising of 1976. The film is a re-edit of material used for the theatre piece Ubu and the Truth Commission, 1997, based on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, produced with the Handspring Puppet Company. The film reflects on the meanings and implications of the devastating stories being told to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996, a series of public hearings into abuses of human rights perpetrated during the apartheid period. This led Kentridge to observe that ironically, since only full confession would merit amnesty, people were compelled to confess ranges and magnitudes of crimes for which amnesty would normally be unthinkable. In Shadow Procession (1999), Kentridge uses the techniques of shadow-theatre. Instead of working with drawings he creates dark cut-out forms which are then made to parade from the left hand side of the screen to the right, hauling their belongings behind them: donkeys, carts, chairs, sacks, even whole towns on their backs, as if in an exodus. Their haunting passage appears like a classical frieze of anonymous shadows on a collective journey.

Kentridge’s latest film, Zeno Writing was first presented at Documenta XI, in Kassel, in 2002. Zeno Writing emerged out of the multi-media theatre piece Confessions of Zeno, a dialogue between actors, puppets, projected visual imagery and live and recorded music. The film portrays the story of one man's night of coming to terms with existential angst and the death of his father. It draws upon Italo Svevo’s literary masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno.

Crossings This one-off presentation of Kentridge’s films has been organised with the artist, in association with the Crossings project, through Devon Media Education Centre. In 1998, Devon Curriculum Services set up a cultural exchange programme with artists and schools in Cape Town under the direction of Martin Phillips. Crossings has operated on a wide front, involving teacher exchanges and research visits, school link programmes through e-mail, video conferencing and video diary, and has resulted in the publication of curriculum support materials on art and poetry.

Homeland The William Kentridge exhibition, and Jenny Mellings residency, are presented as part of the Homeland project, a series of contemporary art exhibitions and events, organized by Spacex and Relational Projects, which essentially pose the question "What is Middle England?" The main part of the project will be sited in everyday locations around the city of Exeter, as well as at Spacex, in April-May 2004. Increasingly politicians, advertising and the media refer to Middle England as if it were an accepted definition, and yet its underlying criteria remain unclear. The question of who is able to consider themselves a part of Middle England, for example, is ambiguous. Homeland sets out to investigate this peculiarly English, class-bound model of community, with its strong sense of belonging and ownership, and thus its equivalent sense of exclusivity and seeming hostility towards difference.

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work today. His work has been featured in numerous international one-person and group exhibitions. In 1990 he was included in Art from South Africa at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In 1993, Kentridge participated in In Croc del Sud at the 45th Venice Biennale. In 1995, he exhibited multimedia work in Africus, the first Johannesburg Biennale. He was featured in Jurassic Technologies Revenant (1996), the 10th Sydney Biennale; Documenta X (1997) in Kassel, Germany; 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 one-person shows of Kentridge's work; one-person shows have since been seen also at Kunstverein München in Munich (1998), Museu d'Arte Contemporani in Barcelona (1999), and the Serpentine Gallery in London (1999). 1998 also saw the artist selected as a finalist for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's second Hugo Boss prize. In 1999, Kentridge presented Stereoscope, eighth in the Soho Eckstein film series, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and was included in dAPERTutto at the 48th Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie International 1999/2000 in Pittsburgh. 2001 saw the launch of a substantial survey show of Kentridge’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, travelling thereafter to New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles during 2001/2002.

A retrospective tour, organized by the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin started in January 2004. This is a major survey of all his oeuvre with a particular focus on recent works. Following Rivoli the exhibition tours to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (March 25 – May 31 2004), to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (September 1 – November 28 2004), and to the Musée d’ Art Contemporain, Montréal (February 10 – April 23 2005). It is then also expected to travel to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg later in 2005.

The William Kentridge exhibition at Spacex, and the accompanying Animation Factory, is presented in association with the Crossings project, through Devon Media Education Centre, and Animated Exeter, with support from Arts Council England. The Homeland project is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England.

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William Kentridge