On the occasion of the artist’s 70th birthday, Museum Folkwang is hosting a major retrospective covering William Kentridge’s entire career with exhibits spanning more than four decades. One focus will be on the films from the Drawings for Projection series which deal with the rise and fall of Johannesburg and the difficult legacy of apartheid. Kentridge’s focus on European colonialism in Africa also plays an important role in the exhibition, particularly in the form of his drawing series Colonial Landscapes, the Porter tapestries and the mechanical miniature stage Black Box/Chambre Noire.
For many years now, William Kentridge has been creating his own pieces for music theatre, which he then elaborates into multimedia works; a prime example is To Cross One More Sea, a three-channel film installation about artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime by ship. Kentridge also appears in his own films. The 2024 film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot provides an amusing, in-depth insight into his thought and his studio as a place of creative artistic practice.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden is hosting a simultaneous showcase of Kentridge's work.
