UCCA presents a comprehensive retrospective of William Kentridge, including works from nearly every major project the artist has undertaken from 1988 to the present.

UCCA proudly presents "William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera," a comprehensive retrospective that marks the artist's largest exhibition in Asia to date. Displayed across a two-story edifice designed by Kentridge's frequent collaborator Sabine Theunissen in the UCCA Great Hall, the show includes works from nearly every major project the artist has undertaken from 1988 to the present. The exhibition spans a vast array of media: two-dimensional artworks in India ink, charcoal, linocut, and silkscreen print on paper; kinetic sculptures that evoke the Duchampian ready-made tradition; several multi-channel video artworks comprising dozens of projections; and a large-scale installation in the form of an operatic model complete with mechanical puppet actors.

The core of the exhibition is its titular piece Notes Towards a Model Opera. Rooted in extensive research into the intellectual, political, and social history of modern China, from Lu Xun to revolutionary theater, that Kentridge undertook in preparation for this exhibition, this three-channel projection explores dynamics of cultural diffusion and metamorphosis through the formal prism of the eight model operas of the Cultural Revolution. The piece considers these didactic ballets both as a cultural phenomenon unto itself and as part of a history of dance that spans continents and centuries. Starting from its origins in Paris, Kentridge playfully overlays the aesthetic and ideological transformations of ballet as it is transplanted across the globe, an arch of influence juxtaposing contexts as disparate as Moscow, Shanghai, and the artist's native Johannesburg. Dada Masilo is choreographer and dancer, and the score composed and soundtrack designed by Philip Miller. As is true of many of his projects, Notes Towards a Model Opera is accompanied by a series of two-dimensional pieces inspired by this course of research and production, in this instance a set of calligraphic India ink drawings on paper from Chinese books.

Another centerpiece of the exhibition is William Kentridge's "Soho Eckstein" cycle, a series of hand-drawn animations that helped establish his presence in the 1980s and 90s. Set against a backdrop of the harsh realities of the private mining industry in modern-day Johannesburg, the films recount the love triangle between the business titan Soho, his wife, and the lowly,daydreaming Felix Teitlebaum—a stand-in for the artist himself. Here Kentridge's notion of "provisionality" is embodied not only in the film’s metamorphosing figures, but also in the artist’s process of production, as marks of erasure gradually build up over the scene. On view at UCCA are all of the ten "Soho Eckstein" films to date. These and other films including Shadow Procession (1999), Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), and Second-Hand Reading (2013) together encapsulate many of the visual and narrative motifs repeated throughout his career: drawing as palimpsest, genocide as the legacy of the Enlightenment, the interdependence of shadow and light, and the hope of revolution supplanted by the terror of its collapse.

Like animation, William Kentridge views opera as an ideal artistic form, capable of staging multiple views of a subject simultaneously for the consideration of auteur and audience, the voices of each character combining (dis)harmoniously in the final work. Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005), a project that grew out of the artist's staging of Mozart's The Magic Flute, is here rendered as a theater performance-cum-video installation, where mechanical puppets dance to Sarastro's Aria while scenes of the 1904 Herero genocide unfold in the background. The artist reframes the Enlightenment not as the triumph of reason, but as a failed faith in rationalism that led inexorably to the perverted logic of colonialism and Apartheid. This interest in the delusions inherent to idealism is also found in his I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), a project born out of Kentridge's 2009 take on Shostakovich's rarely performed opera The Nose. Combining video and installation with a lecture-like filmic performance, the artwork is an elegy for Russian Modernism in the face of political upheaval, the rise and fall of the avant-garde during the 1917 revolution ultimately revealing the perils of utopianism. The music for both works is by Philip Miller.

Other sections of the exhibition highlight the breadth of artistic practices William Kentridge has engaged over the past three decades. First exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13), The Refusal of Time (2012) considers historical conceptions of time through a series of kinetic sculptures. A five-channel video surrounds viewers and the mechanical "elephant" installation breathing at its center. This work, which grew out of a dialogue with historian of science Peter Galison, probes the origin of geographical time zones brought on by the proliferation of telecommunication cables, beginning in nineteenth-century Paris with the use of steam—itself reminiscent of breath, a human clock of sorts—to (imperfectly) standardize city clocks. Kentridge uses the inaccuracies inherent to all human calculations of time to explore the inexorable progress of entropy, treating scientific innovation as a metaphorical body. Here time's "refusal" carries layers of individual and political meaning: for the individual, it is through breathing that time is refused until the end of life, and for South Africa, it is the refusal of Eurocentric time from which strength arises. Philip Miller is composer of the music and soundscape. Catherine Meyburgh is responsible for the video editing and construction. Dada Masilo is responsible for the choreography and dance.

Finally, accompanying Notes Towards a Model Opera on the second floor of the exhibition hall is a reading room where viewers can page through a selection of William Kentridge's artist books and short films. Among them, a set of flipbooks including the monumental 2nd Hand Reading offer a new format for the artist to explore the relationship between drawing, filmmaking, and photography. The reading room also incorporates a group of Kentridge's Drawing Lessons, quasi-didactic short films on making art in the studio that, in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, contain equal parts pedagogy and art.

The exhibition "William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera" is accompanied by an English catalogue of the same title. The book contains essays by Andrew Solomon, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University; sinologist and renowned historian of Chinese visual culture Alfreda Murck; and UCCA Director Philip Tinari. At the core of the catalogue is a text by Kentridge himself entitled "Peripheral Thinking," a reproduction of the artist's notebook for a lecture on this project and his engagement with China. The text follows in the tradition of the theatrical lectures best exemplified by his 2012 Norton Lectures at Harvard, whose associated publication Six Drawing Lessons will also debut in Chinese in conjunction with the UCCA exhibition.

Curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari with Assistant Curator Zoe Diao, "William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera" opens to the public June 27 and runs until August 30. The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of Rolex. Barco is the video equipment sponsor; GENELEC is the exclusive sound equipment support. Additional support comes from Goodman Gallery and Marian Goodman Gallery. Promotional videos for the exhibition were co-produced by UCCA and Action Media.

Download "William Kentridge: Notes Towards a Model Opera" press release.

Public Programs

UCCA has organized a diverse assortment of Public Programs in conjunction with "Notes Towards a Model Opera." Coinciding with the public opening on June 27, "A Day of Peripheral Thinking" convenes a series of forums and performances that expand the critical scope of the exhibition, touching on William Kentridge's methodology, his impact on Chinese contemporary art, and the social and political topics he explores. The program opens with a dialogue between the artist and his former protégé, Mateo López. Paired together through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2012-13, Kentridge and López both share the artist studio as crux of their conceptual practices. Later in the day, sinologist and renowned historian of Chinese visual culture Alfreda Murck, artists Liu Heung Shing, Wang Jianwei, and Qiu Zhijie, as well as UCCA Director Phillip Tinari review Kentridge's impact on Chinese art practices since his first appearance on the mainland in the 2000 Shanghai Biennale. Kentridge will then deliver "Peripheral Thinking," his newest lecture that teases out a relationship of aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns connecting South Africa and China. "A Day of Peripheral Thinking" culminates in "Pulling Numbers: A Ciné-Concert by Philip Miller and William Kentridge." Longtime collaborator and musical composer Phillip Miller leads this two-part concert inspired by a Chinese gambling game, featuring several of Kentridge's films, the vocals of Ann Masina, and the talents of seven local musicians. For more information regarding Public Programs related to the exhibition, please visit the UCCA website.

About the Artist

William Kentridge's work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2002, 2012), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998, 2010), and the Metropolitan Museum, New York (2013). A substantial survey of Kentridge's work opened in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. This summer Kentridge will direct Alban's Berg's opera Lulu in a co-production of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, the Metropolitan Opera in New York (November 2015), and the English National Opera in London. More Sweetly Play the Dance is conceived as an 8-channel video projection and is currently being exhibited at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam.

Beginnings

The exhibition opens with the 1989 print Casspirs Full of Love, a drypoint etching of seven disembodied heads inside a cabinet alongside the titular phrase. The Casspir is a South African armed vehicle developed during border disputes with Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s but later deployed against residents of the townships in the waning days of apartheid. The phrase is a reference to a South African radio show in which a (white) mother wished her son, then serving in the army, "Casspirs full of love." The odd juxtaposition between love and death, between affection and violence, and between text and image, resurfaces throughout Kentridge's work.

Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, and Art in a State of Siege is a trilogy of silkscreen prints made in 1988. They comprise Kentridge's opening manifesto as a visual artist, marking his creative starting point. Art in a State of Grace is an allegory for death by comfortable, unambitious art; Art in a State of Hope expresses a sense of blind faith in the influence of art; and Art in a State of Siege reveals the vacuity of the so-called "power of art." Overt in their attention to the political, these works reflect the artist's interest in theater along with other elements of his mature artistic language. The brown paper is similar to the material Kentridge had previously used to design theater posters. The slogans evoke political movements in South Africa and Russia, as well as the cultures these movements engendered.

Soho Films

From Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989) to Other Faces (2011), William Kentridge has produced ten animated films revolving around the fictional characters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum. Set in lateapartheid South Africa, the plots of the films connect loosely and do not follow a strict narrative.

The wealthy mining mogul Soho is at the center of several of the films. With a coffee pot delving straight into his mine shafts (Mine), Soho lives an extravagant life, even opting to donate a monument to the already scenic Johannesburg (Monument). Having neglected his wife, he struggles to win her back from a love affair with Felix (Sobreity, Obesity and Growing Old); however, Soho suffers from both a guilty conscience and chronic health problems that take a turn for the worse after the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (History of the Main Complaint), culminating in Other Faces, in which Soho reflects upon his entire life. Felix, often read as an artist or poet, frequently appears nude in the films, hinting at his more introspective nature. After Mr. and Mrs. Eckstein have reconciled their marriage, Felix seems to leave Johannesburg and we meet a new character—Nandi (Felix in Exile).

Soho and Felix appear in alternating turns in the movie, and while they seem like two individuals, they might also be read as the dual personalities of the artist. Born to a family of Jewish immigrants, Kentridge's father was a well-known lawyer devoted to human rights in South Africa. Coming from this background, the artist has been both gifted and plagued by a sense of social responsibility. The racial persecution he never experienced as a result of his priveleged upbringing paradoxically feeds his anxiety.

Drawings for Projection

The Soho films began Kentridge's ongoing experiments with stop-motion animation, a technique employed throughout his work. First dubbed "Drawing for Projection," the artist's method requires him to draw a scene, erase parts of the subject, then re-draw it with small modifications, shooting frame by frame to eventually realize coherent, naturalistic movement on screen. In this way, every frame of the image is not the result of tediously copied reproductions, but the evolution of a subject in the original drawing. The picture plane is worked and reworked, endowing it with a rough sense of continuity through the traces of erased images still present in the final tableau. The drawings in this exhibition are original stills from the Soho series, each piece the culmination of one continuous motion. Although these drawings for projection may seem unpolished in style, their final forms are the result of intensive labor. Instead of pastels or colored pencils, Kentridge uses the gray scale of charcoal, imbuing every scene with a somber weight.

Ubu Tells the Truth

Ubu and the Truth Commission is a play directed by William Kentridge with a script by Jane Taylor. Debuting in Johannesburg in 1997, the piece incorporates puppetry, projected animation, and live performance. Ubu Tells the Truth sees Kentridge translate this theater work into video.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established by the government of South Africa in 1995 to resolve issues related to the end of apartheid. King Ubu, the notorious protagonist of Alfred Jarry's 1896 absurdist masterpiece Ubu Roi, here reappears one hundred years later as a symbolic figure in this contemporary drama. Kentridge's early theatrical training in Paris and his interest in interdisciplinary collaboration gave this, his first theater work, creative dexterity, further incorporating charcoal drawing, animation, and photography. The film is both a continuation of his earlier style and a shift toward the forms and moods of his later works.

Shadow Procession

"Procession" is a repeated motif in Kentridge's work. The artist here adapts a multi-media approach in an exploration unfolding in flat, horizontal space. The theme of Shadow Procession harkens to Plato's allegory of the cave in The Republic—prisoners of the dark cave awaiting a philosopher king, who suffers the ethical dilemma of adopting violence to save his companions. Constructed from torn fragments of paper, these silhouettes yield greater visual interest than hard-contoured depictions. The characters are residents of Johannesburg, casting a shade of historical realism onto this ancient story. Shadow Procession was first exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, marking the beginning of a dialogue in China regarding Kentridge's work.

Black Box / Chambre Noire

The inspiration for Black Box / Chambre Noire come from Kentridge's experience working on a production of The Magic Flute for the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels in 2003. The Magic Flute is the last masterpiece of Mozart's late period. It follows the story of a prince tasked with rescuing a princess by undergoing feats to test his fortitude. Other key characters include Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, representatives of good and evil, light and darkness. In the opera, order is restored in an ending reflective of the Enlightenment's utopian belief in absolute truth. The Magic Flute was Kentridge’s first major opera, and Black Box / Chambre Noire is his attempt to resolve the questions raised by this endeavor.

Black Box / Chambre Noire is a miniaturized version of The Magic Flute. The installation uses a recording of the opera made in Berlin in 1938 and images depicting to the 1904 genocide of the Herero tribe by German colonists. Kentridge combines eggbeaters, compasses, and other objects from his studio in a performance of this modern tragedy, likening the origin of the greater colonial project to the motivation of Sarastro, who here brings not civilization and culture, but, conversely, darkness and violence. Black Box / Chambre Noire also models the artist's notion of stage as camera. Specifically, he evokes the camera obscura, its stage-like platform and dark interior being the precondition for capturing light. These are not simply conflicts at the heart of theater, but issues confronted daily in the artist's studio.

I am not me, the horse is not mine

In 2008 Kentridge turned to Modernism for inspiration, looking to the Russian avant-garde. I am not me, the horse is not mine is rooted in Dmitri Shostakovich's first opera The Nose, a 1928 adaptation from Nikolai Gogol's short novel of the same name (1835-1836). Kentridge's presentation of The Nose premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. In the story, the nose of a prominent military officer leaves him to start a new life.

The revolution of 1917 brought a glimmer of hope to Russian society, but as its accomplishments began to fall short of the idealism that precipitated it, revolutionary fervor quickly transformed into hostile resentment as once reasonable citizens fell victim to their irrational environment. Kentridge's work embraces the absurdity and discord of Gogol's novel, allowing a caricature of his own nose, "an Ashkenazi Jewish nose" as he calls it, to travel through scenes from history. Separated into eight channels, illogical imagery frenetically flashes from screen to screen, as Kentridge's nose—the artist himself disguised as a horse—embarks on its journey satirizing the eerie realities of that historical moment. The title of the works is a translation of a Russian phrase used to deny responsibility for an offense. As the artist has noted, "I am not me, the horse is not mine is both a celebration and an elegy–a celebration of the extraordinary creative outpouring unleashed by the 1917 Revolution and its hope and promise of human transformation; and the elegy of the dashing of these."

The Refusal of Time

First exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13), the five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time is one of Kentridge's best known works. "Time"—a metaphysical dilemma met with renewed interest generation after generation—is regarded as existing as a matter of course. Completed with the assistance of several long-time collaborators, The Refusal of Time questions the precision and standardization of time. Through dialogues with Harvard University historian of science Peter Galison, the artist conducted extensive research into theories of time from Newton to Einstein. South African composer Phillip Miller created the musical score, while Kentridge co-choreographed the dance with Dada Masilo. The work also employed the help of costume designers, set designers, and technicians from around the world.

The Refusal of Time explores different ways in which the abstract notion of "time" has been made concrete, beginning in nineteenth-century Paris where steam and pneumatic tubes—themselves reminiscent of human breath—were used to imperfectly standardize neighborhood clocks, and moving on to the idea of geographical time and time zones accompanying the proliferation of telegraphic cables. Kentridge uses the inaccuracies inherent to all human measurements of time to explore the inexorable progress of entropy.The Refusal of Time treats scientific innovation as a metaphorical body, the piece playing out in thirty minutes with projections surrounding the viewer and a mechanical sculpture known as the "elephant" breathing at its center. Here time's "refusal" carries layers of individual and political meaning: for the individual, it is through breathing that time is refused until the end of life, and for locales like South Africa, it is the refusal of Eurocentric time from which strength arises.

Second-Hand Reading

Completed in 2013, Second-Hand Reading conveys Kentridge's philosophical musings using flip-book animation, accompanied by the music of South African composer Neo Muyanga. In contrast to the artist's previous animation technique of drawing and re-drawing motion on the same page, Second-Hand Reading takes a 1914 edition of Cassell's Encyclopedia of Mechanics and, at twelve pages per second, creates an continuously transforming subject, using charcoal, India ink, and colored pencil.

The encyclopedia and method of flip-book animation evoke approaches to knowledge production whose times have passed, drawn together by the artist's charcoal drawings and bounding over the numerous artistic movements that are modernism's legacy. Here Kentridge uses old materials to create new forms, which ironically contemplate history. The physicality of the book and the abstract content remain separate—the content playing a lesser role in the artist's choice of materials compared to the coloration and format of the old pages. Images of the pacing artist, the landscapes surrounding Johannesburg, and dancing human figures are all depicted within the book. As Andrew Solomon has commented, "Drawing in a book, like filming a movie, increases the sequential nature of a piece of work; the image may be paramount, but it can never escape its literary nature."

Image and Metaphor

Like the figures in Shadow Procession, these black-ink trees are inspired by the surroundings of the artist's Johannesburg studio. In 1900, the local government of Johannesburg launched a reforestation project—in part to keep former soldiers busy. Providing the initial concept for Lie of the Land, the resultant strips of lush, green trees create a sharp contrast in the landscape between urban districts and the more desolate outskirts. Although Kentridge's drawings appear proportional, they were, in fact, drawn one page at a time then pieced together, abstract drafts coming together to constitute a puzzle-like whole.

Completed in the same year, the bronze sculpture series Rebus (2013) is derived from a process antithetical to that of Second-Hand Reading. The artist first explored the transformations of the sculptural figures through two-dimensional sketches, which were then quickly transferred into plastic form. When viewed from different angles, the pieces of Rebus appear as entirely different objects. Like a collection of hieroglyphs, the line of statues can be rearranged to form new phrases, giving power of interpretation to viewers. If Second-Hand Reading keeps abstract thought inside of a book, Rebus materializes it into physical form.

Notes Towards a Model Opera

Notes Towards a Model Opera, a new project premiering in this exhibition, follows the artist's distinctive methodology in a continuation of his investigation of global modernity. Ballet, originating in the seventeenth century French court, is symbolically placed at the center of an imaginary circle, with Johannesburg, Shanghai, and Moscow connected along its circumference. The old maps of France, China, and South Africa in the background hint at the actual points of reference for this exercise in what the artist has called "peripheral thinking." The dance of 1950s colonial Johannesburg mixes with the ballet of China's Revolutionary model operas, set to the "Internationale," a song first written during the 1871 Paris Commune. Peripheries veer back towards the center following a logic not unlike the quantum principles dictating the great expansion following the Big Bang and the postulated imminent collapse upon breach of critical mass. The artist believes the meaning of modernity is best understood through these peripheries.

A key target of the campaign against the Four Pests during the Great Leap Forward, sparrows in unceasing flight are superimposed onto pages of the Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary from the second century, while the urgent tapping in the background evokes the banging of pots and pans to prevent the sparrows from landing, thus dying of exhaustion. Here the artist uses black ink and a worn-down brush, which creates loose contours. This stylistic choice also refers inadvertently to Chinese free-hand drawing.

With music and dance from longtime collaborators Philip Miller and Dada Masilo, and incorporating images as scattered as historical photgraphs of China, Africa, France, and the artist’s own notebooks, Notes Towards a Model Opera can be seen as a synthesis of previously realised forms in Kentridge’s art. If the subject matter is distinctly Chinese, it nonethesless contains elements and themes that have emerged elsewhere in his work, a meditation on ideas and images shared–sometimes incidentally, sometimes intentionally–across vast geographical and historical distances.

Silhouette Cutouts for More Sweetly Play the Dance

Kentridge's 2015 piece More Sweetly Play the Dance was made specifically for the exhibition "If We Ever Get to Heaven" at EYE Film Institute Netherlands. Reminiscent of his 1999 piece Shadow Procession, More Sweetly Play the Dance shows a continuous line of figures holding paper silhouettes in the configuration of a danse macabre. The current exhibition features thirty-three of these figures, including a variety of images that have appeared before in Kentridge's works: coffee pots, birds, and trees, as well
as proletarian figures from Notes Towards a Model Opera, sketches and unfinished human figures. All these encompassing motifs form a unique procession on the wall as if they sprang directly from Kentridge's own mind.

Reading Room

Accompanying Notes Towards a Model Opera on the second f loor of the exhibition hall is a reading room where viewers can page through a selection of William Kentridge's artist books and short films. Among them, a set of flipbooks including the monumental Second-Hand Reading offer a new format for the artist to explore the relationship between drawing, filmmaking, and photography. The reading room also incorporates a group of Kentridge's "Drawing Lessons," quasi-didactic short films on making art in the studio that, in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, contain equal parts pedagogy and art.