Fragments for Georges Melies / Black Box / Chambre Noire. The show presents two of his most recent and to date largest projects. Recurring themes in Kentridge's art are history and memory, ethics, guilt and redemption. His melancholically poetic drawings and animations have already touched many visitors to art events and have been praised internationally. During the exhibition a screening of Kentridge's nine films in the series Drawings for Projection.
Fragments for Georges Melies / Black Box / Chambre Noire
William Kentridge’s melancholically poetic drawings and animations have already
touched many visitors to art events and have been praised internationally. This
spring at Malmo Konsthall he presents two of his most recent and so far largest
works: Black Box / Chambre Noire (2005) and 7 Fragments for Georges
Melies Journey to the Moon (2003). The exhibition is the
artist’s largest in Sweden to date and has earlier been showed at Moderna Museet,
Stockholm, who also is the producer of the exhibition.
Recurring themes in William Kentridge’s art are history and memory, ethics, guilt
and redemption. Raised in a white, prosperous, educated, anti-regime, Jewish family
(his father and grandfather were both lawyers engaged in cases against the apartheid
regime), he was automatically in a situation where he was both part of the system,
and one of its critics – a complex relationship that is processed and reflected in
his oeuvre.
The title Black Box / Chambre Noire refers to the black box in an aeroplane (which
registers data in the event of a crash), the inside of a camera and the darkened
cinema. The work, which Kentridge calls a mourning process, was originally
commissioned by Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and deals
with the German colonisation of what is now Namibia, a virtually forgotten but dark
chapter in history. In a massacre in 1904, which is regarded as one of the worst
instances of genocide of the previous century, the Germans practically wiped out the
whole population in the area. Black Box / Chambre Noire, was mostly built on site on
Skeppsholmen, with the assistance of two stage technicians, and incorporates a
theatre with two projections, six mechanical figures and some fifty drawings.
7 Fragments for Georges Melies Journey to the Moon was produced
in 2003 at the BAC, Visby and now belongs to the Moderna Museet collection. The
title alludes to the visionary film pioneer Georges Melies and his
film from 1902, about a journey to the moon. In the work – which consists of eight
video projections – Kentridge combines performance, film and animations in a homage
to creativity. The fragments were made with materials that happened to be at hand
and simple cinematic tricks. An espresso coffee pot serves as a spaceship and the
“drawings” made by ants crawling in lines along a pattern made for them by the
artist with sugar-water form the sky. Kentridge feels profoundly related to his
centennial predecessor Melies and his creative urges, where the artist
studio, despite its spatial and technical limitations, provides infinite potential.
With imagination and inventiveness, anything can be used to portray a journey to
faraw
ay places. At the same time, he portrays an anxiety relating to the blank page, and
Kentridge also gives us glimpses of a parallel story. The dreams of landing on the
moon are in the same spirit as the dreams of colonising Africa, with the inherent
ambitions of mapping the “dark continent”, taming it, “enlightening it”, and owning
it.
The original soundtrack is composed by Philip Miller.
William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in
Johannesburg. He studied political science and art in Johannesburg and Paris,
France. Kentridge works with drawing and short animated films. His works are often
commentaries on South Africa’s history and apartheid.
Opening Wednesday 30 May 7-9 p.m.
Malmo Konsthall
S:t Johannesgatan, 7 - Malmo