The tribute that LUMA in Arles dedicated to William Kentridge in July this year, just before the launch of “Les rencontres de la Photographie Arles” festival, was a very successful way of drawing attention to one of the most multidisciplinary and iconographic contemporary artists. On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition dedicated to Kentridge, entitled “Je n’attends plus”, open until 12 January 2025, the work “The great yes, the great no” produced in partnership with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence was staged.

Portrait of William Kentridge in the exhibition “Je n’attends plus”, 2024, La Mécanique Générale, Parc des Ateliers, LUMA Arles, France © Norbert Miguletz, ph. courtesy LUMA Arles, France

An imaginative work characteristic of Kentridge’s mise en place, therefore a multimedia work that mixes music, singing, acting and political denunciation, in which the South African artist, taking his cue from a real event, tells us one of the many stories he has accustomed us to over the years, in which someone always flees from a more or less evident repression, which on closer inspection does not belong to the past, but finds deep roots in the present. The centrepiece of “The great yes, the great no” is precisely the tale of a schooner setting sail from the port of Marseilles bound for Martinique and carrying a large number of intellectuals inside, including André Breton and Claude Lévi Strauss, who are leaving France, where the Vichy Republic has just been launched. The story already promises to be gripping, but the irreverent artist’s stroke of genius comes when other characters, key names of anti-colonialism such as Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon and the Nardal sisters, appear in the play, all represented by mixing the surreal and the irrational with an enthralling music with Caribbean and African rhythms.

William Kentridge, “More Sweetly Play the Dance”, 2015. Seven-channel HD film installation, color, surround sound, megaphones, 15 min in loop © Victor&Simon – Joana Luz. Installation view at La Mécanique Générale, Parc des Ateliers, LUMA Arles, France

There’s no denying it, Kentridge is a true genius! This consideration can also be reached by observing the video installation “Oh to Believe in Another World” (2022), where Kentridge’s classic themes come alive again. His ability to make the viewer directly perceive the analysis of the present is unmistakable, and through a series of surrealist images and Dadaist onomatopoeic puns and sounds, the artist disavows Soviet power politics and manifests his criticism of all forms of certainty.

William Kentridge, “Mask of Joséphine Bonaparte” for “The Great Yes, The Great No”, 2024. Cardboard, digital print on paper, and Indian ink © Victor&Simon – Grégoire d’Ablon, ph. courtesy LUMA Arles, France

Ultimately, the greatest aptitude Kentridge possesses is to mix mediums and above all to use them skilfully, interspersing them with each other, all with the same expressive capacity. It must have been his precocious ambitions to become an actor, which he soon abandoned in favour of directing, despite a powerful attention-grabbing physique and Mephistophelean eyebrows. And it is precisely as a director, deus ex machina and architrave of all his works, that Kentridge impersonates his congenial role of orchestrating any performance, linking words, photographs, painting, installations and poetry, demonstrating that everything is possible, and after his artistic intervention, nothing remains as it was before. Kentridge inhabits the places of art and expresses his narrative talent to the utmost, combining the fantasy in his performances with the ethical content, strongly anti-racist and anti-dominance of any suppression.

William Kentridge, “Shostakovich”, 2009. Indian ink on found pages © Victor&Simon – Grégoire d’Ablon, ph. courtesy LUMA Arles, France

In “More Sweetly Play the Dance” (2015), for instance, on a huge screen, marked by shrubs and plants drawn at the base of it, a black man wearing a yellow djaballah twirl across the screens positioned next to each other, with an energy that is contagious to the viewer, who is immediately transported into the work by a full, engaging music. But also in the video installation “KABOOM!” (2018), rhythm and images merge into an unforgettable journey. Particularly in this work, what immediately jumps out at you, apart from the beauty of the images, which essential and imaginative alternate on the screen, there is a profound reflection on Kentridge’s ethics. The artist, the son of a lawyer, saw at the age of six, on his father’s desk, black and white photographic images that belonged to the Sharpeville massacre in Johannesburg in 1960. The images made such a strong impression on him that ultimately all his works are intimately characterised by an aesthetic that is as essential as it is imaginative, minimalist even in its frequent use of black and white to which the Sharpeville images refer. Watching “KABOOM!” (2018), melancholy assails the viewer. Images of black men walking down an endless road follow one another. The men march in single file, at a slow and continuous pace, while singing. What captivates us is precisely their singing. A joyful litany that has no reason to be so, being slaves themselves. Yet Kentridge with his continuous nonsense, with his masterful ability to destroy clichés, portraying a reality that cannot be shared even if it is present, takes us right where we often do not want to see. Those men in the Sharpeville massacre, like the slaves in the performance, were helpless victims of the apartheid, and as has often happened in the various historical eras, the most disparate groups, the most fragile and oppressed people, sing, sublimating the pain inflicted on them by the tormentors who dominate them, preparing for a better future, if only through the solidarity they show among themselves during the march.

William Kentridge, costume maquette for “Oh To Believe in Another World (Lilya Brik II)”, 2024. Cardboard, paper, digital print, found pages, water colour, coloured pencil, litho pencil and pins © Victor&Simon – Grégoire d’Ablon, ph. courtesy LUMA Arles, France

Perhaps the biblical parable according to which the last will be the first will indeed come true, but in the meantime, looking at this large installation, like all the artist’s others by the way, one distinctly grasps his ultimate purpose, which is to desecrate and emphasise the oppression of the system towards the weakest, with a sophisticated and cutting social critique. The fact, then, that this banality of evil is precisely aimed at disrupting oppressive and creeping thinking, and is enacted by a privileged white South African man, adds a powerful impact to William Kentridge’s committed art.

Info:

William Kentridge. “Je n’attends plus”
30/06/2024 – 12/01/2025
LUMA Arles
Parc des Ateliers, Avenue Victor Hugo, 35 – Arles
www.luma.org

Silvia Ionna

Globetrotter, passionate about literature, lover of art and photography. I never leave for a trip without taking with me a book by an author of the place where I will go. I have dreamed of moving to Paris for years and sooner or later I will!