Exhibitions

Past Exhibition Special Exhibition

Wiliam Kentridge – What We See & What We Know: Thinking about History while Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move…

Date

Location

Art Museum Special Exhibition Gallery (1F)

About the Exhibition

William Kentridge (b. 1955 in South Africa, based in Johannesburg) began creating his signature ‘drawings in motion’ in the late 1980s. These animated works are created through the laborious process of photographing charcoal-and-pastel drawings with a 35mm motion picture camera, adding new marks and erasures frame by frame to make the drawings ‘move.’ As a continuous record of ceaselessly changing drawings, marks that could not be erased completely are left behind as the animation progresses. These indelible marks contribute a stately air to his expression that could be described as the accumulation of time itself.

Kentridge’s works are deeply affected by the history and contemporary social circumstances of South Africa, and his series of films entitled 9 Drawings for Projection, imbued with the pain inflicted by his country’s history of apartheid, have drawn a great deal of attention from all over the world — beginning with such exhibitions as the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 or Documenta X in 1997 — as an artistic expression/practice of anti-Eurocentric postcolonial criticism. However, a closer reading shows that, beyond their sociopolitical appearances, Kentridge’s works have consistently been engaged in the verification and storytelling of the universal and primordial issues faced by humans in the modern age: the good intentions and the collapse of an individual in his or her resistance to the status quo; the ambiguity of protection and oppression; the effort to reintegrate one’s fragmented self and the impossibility of doing so; and so on.

The artist’s persistent use of the simple technique that he himself has called “stone-age filmmaking” could also be understood as a result of his intent to seek the origins of modern narrative creation, or to uncover the pathology of colonialism from within the Enlightenment as he travels back through history. His unsophisticated animation technique stands in direct opposition to the contemporary mainstream of sophisticated cel and computer-generated animation. The extremely original and powerful expression of his works, however, demonstrate that old-fashioned hand-drawn animation on paper still holds an enormous potential as an expressive medium, and his works have influenced younger generations of artists since the early 1990s.

William Kentridge is one of the most closely watched artists in the world, with a large-scale international exhibition that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 2009, subsequently traveling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, Florida), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Albertina (Vienna), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).

The Japanese exhibition — Kentridge’s first solo exhibition in the country — is the result of three years of close work between the Museums and the artist himself. 19 film works (including 4 film installations), 36 drawings, and 63 prints will be exhibited, covering the full scope of Kentridge’s artistic activities, from the 9 Drawings for Projection (1989-2003), a representative body of work that is centered on the history of South Africa, to I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine (2008), his latest work based on the Shostakovich opera The Nose.

About Artists

Profile

Born in 1955. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Studied Politics, African Studies, and Fine Arts in Johnnesburg, and mime and theatre in Paris.

Begins creating and presenting hand-drawn animated films-composed of charcoal and pastel drawings photographed with a 35mm motion picture camera-at the end of the 1980s. Creates works full of poetic sentiment that address the past and present of his homeland, including apartheid.

Exhibited at Documenta 10 (1997), the São Paulo Art Biennial (1998), the Venice Biennale (1999), the Carnegie International (1999/2000), the Kwangju Biennale (2000), the Yokohama Triennale (2001), Documenta 11 (2002), the Biennale of Sydney (2008), etc.

Recent exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, currently traveling to Fort Worth, West Palm Beach (Florida), New York, Vienna, Jerusalem, and Amsterdam through 2009-11.

Works in a variety of fields, including acting, stage direction, and writing.

Events & Education

Lecture

by Jane Taylor

Date

2010.1.10(Sun)

Time

14:00-15:30

Location

Lecture Hall (B1F)

*Offered in English with translation to Japanese

Professor Jane Taylor is a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in the United States and an Honorary Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She is a curator, critic and writer, and has written extensively on William Kentridge’s art; she has curated his work in shows in South Africa and the United States, and wrote the playscript for his theatre production Ubu and the Truth Commission and the libretto for the recent work of music theatre The Confessions of Zeno, directed by Kentridge, (with composer Kevin Volans) which was commissioned by Dokumenta. Her most recent novel, The Transplant Men, (about the first heart transplant, conducted by Dr Chris Barnard) has just been published, and she has just edited Handspring Puppet Company, a book-length study of the theatre company who have worked with Kentridge for the past fifteen years. She is currently writing a book on Kentridge’s production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which opens at the New York Metropolitan opera in 2010.

by Kohmoto Shinji, Chief Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

Date

2010.1.30(Sat)

Time

14:00-15:30

Time

Lecture Hall (B1F)

*Offered in Japanese only

Gallery Talk

by Curator

Date

2010.1.22(Fri)
2010.2.5(Fri)

Time

18:00-19:00

Location

Special Exhibition Gallery (1F)

*Offered in Japanese only

Catalogue

Hours & Admissions

Location

Art Museum Special Exhibition Gallery (1F)

Date

2010.1.2(Sat)~2.14(Sun)

Time

10:00-17:00 (Friday is 10:00-20:00)
*Last admission is 30 minuites before closing.

Closed

Closed on Mondays (except January 11) and January 12, 2010

Admission

Adults: ¥850 (600)
College and university students: ¥450 (250)

*Including the admission fee for Hayakawa Yoshio and Permanent Collection.
*The price in brackets is for the group of 20 persons or more.
*All prices include tax.
*Free for high school students and under 18.
*Persons with disability and one person accompanying them are admitted free of charge.

Organizer

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Supported by

Embassy of the Republic of South Africa in Japan

Traveling from

The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto:
September 4-October 18, 2009

Traveling to

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art:
March 13-May 9, 2010

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