William Kentridge

William Kentridge is a contemporary South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films and his virtuosity is represented in no less than three exhibitions opening this month. (PS there is a painting of his as part of the current exhibition at the  Standard Bank Gallery too if you want to be absolutely Kentridge-complete.)

The first exhibition is a collaboration with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh, Dada Masilo and Peter Galison at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The Refusal of Time is a video installation on multiple screens. It opened today and closes February 1st. Vince and I went to the opening this afternoon.

According to NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art where the piece was presented in 2012,

"The Refusal of Time is essentially a room-sized, filmic machine—a mechanized Plato's cave in which five video projections surround the viewer and the whole seems to be run by a pumping, organlike sculpture at center. Through a series of half-hour episodes, Kentridge intersperses images of antiquated devices for measuring time (e.g., a metronome or a bellows purported to send pneumatic bursts of air under the streets of Paris for the calibration of official city clocks) with animated drawings and live-action sequences. These vignettes recall a time at the dawn of the last century when Einstein's early experiments with station clocks and telegraphs mirrored other attempts at ordering the world through measurement. They also evoke the more contemporary study of black holes, beyond whose threshold all matter may disappear forever. In the last sequence of The Refusal of Time, as a procession of shadowy silhouettes travels around the room to a driving soundtrack only to be enveloped in blackness, a powerful question remains: after we, too, pass that dark threshold, will there be any trace of us left behind?" 

Got that?

The second is an exhibition of drawings called East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book at the Goodman Gallery. It opens on the November 15th and closes December 20th.

And the third exhibition is called Tapestries and it is a collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio. It opens at Wits Art Museum on November 18th and closes on December 15th.







I am going to try to make it to all of them as I have been wanting to learn more about this artist and native son of Johannesburg. I guess this November is definitely the month to do it.