William Kentridge / Other Faces / 2011

William Kentridge’s Other Faces has been drawn and filmed over the past year. It will be shown at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in conjunction with a group of working drawings used in the film’s animation, as well as drawing fragments and prints. As with other films in the Drawings for Projection series, the artist uses a 35 mm movie camera to film the successive stages of charcoal drawings that are progressively altered through erasure and overdrawing. Other Faces returns to the figure of Soho Eckstein, the industrialist and developer who is the key protagonist of the Drawings for Projection series. In this cycle of nine films created from 1989 through 2003, Kentridge addresses the doubling and contrary sides of the self, personified in the entrepreneur/capitalist Soho and his foil, the poet/ lover Felix. In this most recent work, pin-striped Soho Eckstein moves through a series of collisions of circumstances and recollection. In the film, the city of Johannesburg – inconstant, desperate, desiring, impenetrable – appears not so much as context as it does subject, in images of streets, facades, landscapes, and people. Familiar and recent attributes of the city appear, with one image not just suggesting another image but indicating a connection to displaced emotions and displaced histories. There are references to the street corner civil wars of daily life, and to the xenophobic violence of the last few years. Philip Miller, the Johannesburg composer who has worked with William Kentridge over many projects, composed the music for the film. Catherine Meyburgh, video editor for most of the artist’s video work, is the editor. William Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2003), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998, 2010), the Albertina Museum in Vienna (2010), Jeu de Paume in Paris (2010). Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was presented at Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Festival d’Aix, and at La Scala in Milan. He directed Shostakovich’s The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2010 (which travelled to Festival d’Aix and Lyon in 2011), to coincide with a major exhibition at MoMA. Also in 2010 the Musee du Louvre in Paris presented Carnets d’Egypte, a project conceived especially for the Egyptian room at the Louvre. In the same year, Kentridge received the prestigious Kyoto Prize in recognition of his contributions in the field of arts and philosophy. In 2011, Kentridge was elected as an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.