What We See & What We Know.Thinking About History While Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move…

Category

Exhibition

Year

2009

Institution

The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

Comment

The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK), is pleased to announce on the behalf of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA) the upcoming exhibition, William Kentridge—What We See & What We Know: Thinking About History While Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move…. The exhibition will open at MoMAK in September 2009, and will travel to MOMAT and Hiroshima MOCA in 2010.William Kentridge (b. 1955, South Africa; based in Johannesburg) began creating his signature ‘drawings in motion’ in the late 1980s. These animated works are created through the painstaking 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.’ Kentridge’s films are thus borne from a continuous record of ceaselessly changing drawings. These works are captivating not only for their unique narrativity, but also for the thick accumulation of time, thought, and action that his artistic expression so strongly conveys.Kentridge’s works are deeply affected by the history and contemporary social circumstances of South Africa, and his early works, 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 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, such as the ambiguity of protection and oppression, or the effort to reintegrate one’s fragmented self and the impossibility of doing so. Furthermore, 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 the narratives created by the modern practice of ‘seeing’, or to uncover the pathology of colonialism from within the Enlightenment as he travels back through history. His powerful works—backed by his vast knowledge in history, literature, cinema, theatre, and music, as well as his extremely sharp intelligence—reach beyond the regional sphere of South Africa and have continued to influence younger generations of artists around the world.William Kentridge—What We See & What We Know allows the viewer to trace Kentridge’s footsteps through a total of 19 films and film installations, 36 drawings, and 63 prints, from his earliest works in 1979 to his latest in 2008. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully bilingual exhibition catalogue (size A4, or 210×297 mm, 220 pages) with full color plates of all works exhibited, supplemented with texts written by the artist himself, as well as transcripts of the three lectures he delivered in Kyoto and Tokyo in September 2008. It also includes an introductory essay and expository texts by MoMAK chief curator Shinji Kohmoto; an academic essay by professor Jane Taylor; an expository text by Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art chief curator Yukie Kamiya; and detailed chronologies and a bibliography. It has been published by MoMAK with the goal of making this catalogue a suitable primary source of future studies of Kentridge’s work in Japan, and also to examine his latest activities in particular.What We See & What We Know is the first large-scale exhibition in Japan to introduce the full scope of the works and intellectual challenges of the exceptional artist William Kentridge, up to the present day. It is an enormous pleasure to present this exhibition, long-awaited by both Japanese audiences and the artist himself.(Source: Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan)