William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows
The Broad, Los Angeles
November 12, 2022 - April 9, 2023
And When He Returned, 2019
Hand-woven mohair tapestry
118 x 187 in. (300 x 475 cm)
Collection of the Artist
© William Kentridge
The Shrapnel in the Woods, 2013
India ink on Crabb's Universal Technological Dictionary 1826
82 5/8 x 86 5/8 in. (210 x 220 cm)
© William Kentridge
The Broad presents landmark exhibition William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows surveying 35 years of the celebrated South African artist's work.
Born in Johannesburg in 1955 and living there his entire life, William Kentridge has dedicated much of his five-decade-long career to creating works that explore the social and political conditions of his home country’s transition from Apartheid to democracy. Spanning his well-known charcoal drawings and animated films to prints, bronze sculptures, tapestries, and theater models, the exhibition uses the paradoxes of light and shadow to directly engage with the aftermath of colonialism, the recording and memory of historical narratives, and how the artist’s studio can disrupt the certainties of long-held belief systems. The exhibition coincides with the release of a catalogue published by the museum in collaboration with DelMonico Books and will feature essays and interviews by William Kentridge, Ann McCoy, Zakes Mda, Walter Murch, and The Broad’s Curator Ed Schad.
“For decades, William Kentridge has looked at history–who writes it, what gets recorded by it, and what about it allocates power inside of societies–with an eye towards de-centering and unsettling what we think we know,” said The Broad Founding Director Joanne Heyler. “His viewpoint comes from the important and vital story of South Africa’s struggle for democracy, and it is a viewpoint that is able to look out at the wider world in an effort to show how fragile and ongoing that struggle remains.”
“The work of William Kentridge is a celebration of making, grounded in the cultural fabric of Johannesburg,” said The Broad Curator Ed Schad. “One encounters South African voices and histories, which are turned outwards to look at the wider world. In Kentridge’s collaborations, one feels the richness and energy of a workshop spirt which is defined by openness to unusual ideas, off-kilter points of view, and material disruptions which upends what we think we know.”
For the presentation in Los Angeles, all 18 works from the Broad collection join substantial loans from across the United States and South Africa. Organized both thematically and chronologically throughout the museum’s first-floor galleries, a highlight of the exhibition is The Broad collection’s 30-minute five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012). One of Kentridge’s most celebrated, complex, and immersive works, incorporating elements of sound, sculpture, and moving image, The Refusal of Time is a rich contemplation on colonization and the standardization of time imposed by European interests on the rest of the world. At the core of the installation is a breathing machine the artist refers to as the “elephant” with rhythmic moving bellows, referencing the Dickens’ novel Hard Times, in which machines move “like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.”
In addition to key drawings, sculptures, prints, and tapestries, the artist’s 11 Drawings for Projection films are on view, as well as a series of films that reflect on early cinema, including 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night, and Journey to the Moon (all 2003), a suite of nine short films that prominently feature the artist himself and celebrate the artist’s studio as a site of experimentation and associative play. Many recent drawings will be shown that were created for his monumental performance project The Head & the Load (2018), which unearth the neglected histories of Africans and Africa in World War I. Earlier works such as Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege (all 1988), and early films like Monument (1990) and Mine (1991), show Kentridge’s long-lasting political engagement, upholding artistry and the creative act as its own form of transformative knowledge.
Surveying 35 years of the celebrated South African artist’s practice, William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows features more than 130 works in an engaging and interactive design by Belgian designer Sabine Theunissen. Originated by The Broad, the exhibition will be traveling to Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2023.
Clothbound Hardcover
10.5"H x 8.25"W - 288 Pages
© William Kentridge
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph catalogue, published by The Broad in collaboration with Delmonico Books. The 288-page, book features William Kentridge’s well-known Drawings for Projection films, early prints, drawings, and sculptures, as well as major bodies of work made after 2012–including the monumental installation The Refusal of Time (2012)–which serve as an extended meditation on Kentridge’s studio practice. The volume is organized chronologically and thematically, starting with William Kentridge’s artistic beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, leading into his destabilization of South African and global narratives through an openness to uncertainty, the generative power of the artist’s studio, and perpetual change, all as conditions for illuminating repressed and silenced voices in historical records. An essay by The Broad Curator Ed Schad is presented along with illustrations and analysis of William Kentridge’s work, joining essays by artist and writer Ann McCoy and renowned novelist and thinker Zakes Mda. Notably, the volume includes conversations between Kentridge with revolutionary film and sound editor Walter Murch. The catalogue is available at The Shop at The Broad and online for $65.
THE BROAD
221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
