William Kentridge

The World Is Leaking, 2023

There Were No Books and The World Is Leaking are from Kentridge's new series of drawings that relate to his new theatre production in the making, titled The Great Yes, The Great No, in which the artist uses the journey of a ship from Marseille to Martinique as a prompt for unpacking power, colonialism and migration. The drawings are used as backdrops in the performance and portray imagined scenes from the boat’s arrival in Martinique - an idea of the exotic Caribbean, which is in fact the domestic garden of Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio. Densely packed vegetation is punctuated by fragments of text - phrases such as “the house of justice has collapsed” or “we want no prophets in this garden”. The phrases come from the theatre production and prompt the idea of a drawing being what you read as a text, or a text that, in this case, turns into a garden. In Kentridge’s words “How much do you glean from what you read, and how much of what you read is changed by what you’re seeing around it?”