Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. William Kentridge, born in 1955 in Johannesburg, is not simply an artist who draws with charcoal. He is a magician who transforms his strokes into living spectacles, an illusionist who makes shadows dance on our walls and our consciences. His works are windows open to the absurdity of our world, mirrors that reflect our deepest paradoxes, portals to a reality where the past stubbornly refuses to disappear.
In his Johannesburg studio, a city he has never left despite the upheavals of history, Kentridge orchestrates a perpetual ballet between the fixed and the moving. His signature technique, which consists of photographing his charcoal drawings after each modification to create animations, is not just a simple technical feat. It is a visceral metaphor for our inability to completely erase the past. Each modified stroke leaves a trace, a ghost that persists, like the scars of history on our present. This method, which he developed in the late 1980s, has become his artistic signature, a unique way of capturing the movement of time and the persistence of memory.
Take his “Drawings for Projection”, this series of animations created between 1989 and 2003. These works are not simple films. They are psychological excavations where two characters, Soho Eckstein, the ruthless capitalist in a striped suit, and Felix Teitlebaum, the dreaming artist often depicted nude, become archetypes of a torn society. Through these characters, Kentridge explores the fundamental contradictions of post-apartheid South African society: wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, memory and forgetting. But he doesn’t offer us a simplistic critique of good versus evil. No, he plunges us into the gray areas where morality wavers, where certainties collapse like the buildings in his animations.
This duality brings us to the first theme of his work: perpetual transformation and the impossibility of forgetting. Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, spoke of the Angel of History, pushed toward the future while looking at the ruins accumulating behind him. Kentridge perfectly embodies this vision. His animations are like this angel: they move forward inexorably while carrying the weight of the past in every grain of charcoal that refuses to completely disappear. This visual persistence becomes a powerful metaphor for how history continues to inhabit our present, even when we try to erase it.
Kentridge’s technique is particularly evident in “Mine” (1991), where he explores the literal and metaphorical depths of the South African mining industry. The fluid transitions between Soho Eckstein’s luxurious office and the underground tunnels where miners work create a dizzying moral geography. The camera plunges from the padded office to the bowels of the earth, revealing the invisible connections between the comfort of some and the suffering of others. Coffee pots transform into drills, beds into mine shafts, in a macabre choreography that reveals the power structures hidden beneath society’s surface.
In “Felix in Exile” (1994), Kentridge explores this idea with devastating power. South African landscapes transform into topographical maps, then into wounded bodies, then into newspapers that fly away. Each metamorphosis carries within it traces of what came before. It’s Ovid meeting Marx in a macabre dance where metamorphosis becomes a political act. Transformation is not an escape but a form of responsibility: we are forced to see what we would like to forget. The bodies of political violence victims, drawn by the character of Nandi, a surveyor who documents the regime’s crimes, refuse to disappear, even when covered by newspapers or erased by rain.
This approach echoes Theodor Adorno’s thinking in “Negative Dialectics”, which stated that art must bear witness to the inexpressible without claiming to represent it directly. Kentridge achieves this tour de force by creating works that are both specific to South Africa and universally resonant. He doesn’t show us the horror of apartheid directly, but makes us feel its absurdity through striking visual metaphors. The megaphones that regularly appear in his work don’t shout political slogans, but diffuse a cacophony of sounds that evokes the moral confusion of the era.
The second theme that runs through his work is that of collective memory and its manipulation. In “Ubu Tells the Truth” (1997), Kentridge revisits Alfred Jarry’s figure of Ubu Roi to explore the mechanisms of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The work becomes a grating meditation on the very nature of historical truth. How can a society confront its past without sinking into denial or self-flagellation? The use of Ubu’s grotesque figure, mixed with documentary images and animated sequences, creates a biting commentary on the limits of transitional justice.
This question brings us back to Maurice Halbwachs and his theory of social frameworks of memory. According to him, our individual memories are always shaped by the social contexts in which we evolve. Kentridge brilliantly illustrates this idea by showing how his characters’ personal memories are constantly intertwined with grand historical narratives. In “History of the Main Complaint” (1996), Soho Eckstein’s traumatic memories mix with medical examination images, creating a powerful metaphor for South African society attempting to diagnose its own ills. X-rays, electrocardiograms, and brain scans become tools for exploring a nation’s collective conscience.
The body, in Kentridge’s work, is never simply a body. It is a battlefield where history’s violence is inscribed. In “Stereoscope” (1999), the constant doubling of images evokes the social schizophrenia of post-apartheid South Africa. The blue lines that connect different elements of the animation suggest electrical, nervous, social connections, creating a complex network of responsibilities and complicities. This work echoes Michel Foucault’s theories on power and the social body, showing how structures of domination are inscribed in individuals’ very flesh.
The artist doesn’t just draw, he creates entire universes where theater, opera, sculpture, and animation meet. His work for Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” or Shostakovich’s “The Nose” shows his ability to transform classical works into contemporary commentaries on power and absurdity. These productions are not simple adaptations, but complete reinventions where music, image, and movement create a new language. Video projections dialogue with singers, shadows dance with musicians, creating a total spectacle that transcends boundaries between artistic disciplines.
In “The Refusal of Time” (2012), a monumental installation created in collaboration with physicist Peter Galison, Kentridge explores our complex relationship with time and progress. A large breathing machine, nicknamed “the elephant,” pulses at the center of the work like a mechanical heart. This installation echoes Henri Bergson’s theories on duration and memory. For Bergson, time is not a linear succession of instants, but a continuous interpenetration of past and present. Kentridge’s animations, with their persistent traces and continuous transformations, perfectly embody this conception of time.
The machine itself becomes a metaphor for the standardization of time in the colonial era, when European clocks were imposed on the rest of the world. The multiple projections surrounding it create a visual symphony where shadows of colonial history dance with contemporary anxieties about technological progress. The figures who walk, run, or dance around the machine seem both free and prisoners of this great temporal mechanism.
The artist constantly plays with scales, moving from microscopic to monumental. His tapestries, created in collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio, transform his drawings into impressive textile works. These pieces are not simple enlargements, but translations that give a new dimension to his visual explorations. The artisanal process of tapestry, with its interwoven threads, becomes an additional metaphor for the interconnection between past and present. Traditional African motifs mix with references to European art history, creating works that transcend cultural divisions.
In “More Sweetly Play the Dance” (2015), Kentridge continues to explore the themes that have always obsessed him, but with renewed urgency. This video frieze shows a procession of silhouettes carrying invisible burdens, dancing to the sound of a brass band. The work evokes both medieval dances of death and contemporary refugee movements. The figures projected onto pages of old books and newspapers create a visual palimpsest where personal and collective history merge. It’s a memento mori for our time, reminding us that we are all in motion, all vulnerable, all connected.
What makes Kentridge unique is that he maintains a precarious balance between political engagement and pure poetry. His works never fall into the trap of propaganda or simplism. On the contrary, they embrace complexity and ambiguity. As he himself says: “I am interested in political art that asks questions rather than gives answers”. This approach makes him a particularly relevant artist for our “post-truth” era, where simplistic certainties clash with reality’s complexity.
His use of charcoal is not incidental. This primitive medium, made of pure carbon, carries within it a history that goes back to the first traces left by humans on cave walls. In Kentridge’s hands, it becomes a tool for exploring the shadows of our collective consciousness. The traces left by successive erasures create a visual stratification that recalls the layers of history, the strata of memory.
The influence of theater is omnipresent in his work. Trained at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, Kentridge understands the importance of movement and gesture. His animations are not simply sequences of images, but choreographies where each movement is loaded with meaning. The characters who traverse his works are like actors in a contemporary shadow theater, wearing the masks of our time.
Music also plays a major role in his work. His collaborations with composer Philip Miller have created soundscapes that amplify the emotional power of his images. The sounds of machines, voices, fragmented melodies create a soundtrack for history in the making. In his opera productions, music becomes a character in its own right, dialoguing with projected images and live performances.
What strikes one in the entirety of his work is that he creates art that is both deeply personal and universally accessible. His charcoal drawings, apparently simple, contain entire universes of meaning. Each stroke, each erasure, each transformation becomes an act of resistance against forgetting and indifference. His work reminds us that art can be both witness to history and agent of transformation.
While in our world truth is increasingly difficult to discern, where old certainties collapse and new walls are erected, Kentridge’s work reminds us of the importance of remaining vigilant, questioning our certainties, and never ceasing to seek beauty in imperfection. His art shows us that truth often resides in the shadows, in the traces left by our attempts at erasure, in the ghosts that persist despite our efforts to make them disappear.
Through his animated drawings, installations, and stagings, Kentridge creates art that refuses easy simplifications. He reminds us that we live in a world of continuous metamorphoses, where nothing is ever truly erased. His work is a testament to the power of art as a means of confronting history while imagining new possible futures. In a century marked by divisions and conflicts, his work shows us that art can still be a space for dialogue, reflection, and hope.
