William

Kentridge

A

Nicely

Built

City

Developed and produced over nine months in the artist’s Johannesburg studio, the title for the new film is adapted from a West African proverb, “A nicely built city never resists destruction”. It forms part of an informal collection of aphorisms that Kentridge first used in an etching series published by Caversham Press in 1995. Repurposed and qualified with the introduction of parentheses, A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction) immerses the viewer in contemporary Johannesburg, a post-colonial city racked by infrastructural and environmental challenges as it adapts from its foundational gold-mining economy.

Merging social and personal biography, this elegiac film summons events familiar to the city’s dogged residents, including trees stricken by the fungus of a non-indigenous beetle and a fictional reimagining of the July 2023 methane gas explosion that destroyed parts of Bree Street in central Johannesburg. The action of the film moves between the turbulent commons of Johannesburg’s city streets and the sedate modernist home of industrialist Soho Eckstein, a central protagonist in Kentridge’s evolving cycle of films.

“In 1989, when I made Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, Soho Eckstein was a much older man,” says Kentridge of his fictional protagonist and proxy for avarice. “I was the age of Felix Teitelbaum, the other protagonist in the early films. In the 37 years that have followed, Soho hasn’t really aged, but I have. What used to be a very external, antagonistic character has, over the years, by default, become closer to me. The challenge for me as an artist has always been to find a connection between my life and the life of Johannesburg, and the world of Soho in the films.”

Integral to the action of the film is Soho Eckstein’s unnamed black cat. It meanders between frames, in one scene offering comfort to Soho, in another dancing on its hind legs, and in yet another arriving like a herald before a violent inner-city explosion. The cat is a resident motif in Kentridge’s bountiful oeuvre, at once biographically linked to the childhood gift of a cat print by artist Cecil Skotnes and simply a convenient formal device.

A recurring motif in Kentridge’s mature output, meriting a spotlight section in his 2022 survey exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, trees not only gesture to the leafy landscape of Houghton, where Kentridge lives and maintains a studio, but also connect to the figure of Eurydice. In Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, Orpheus journeys to Hades to retrieve his dead bride Eurydice, an oak tree nymph or dryad. Arboreal motifs also recur in A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction), a film in which ruined buildings – based on contemporary images of Caracas, Gaza, Johannesburg, Tehran and Tel Aviv – transform into trees.

The exhibition also gathers a number of works developed in relation to Kentridge’s production of L’Orfeo at the 2026 Glyndebourne Festival. Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes (2026) is a new Pepper’s Ghost film installation integrating workshop footage for L’Orfeo filmed in Johannesburg with works on paper, sculpture and found paper ephemera. Part of a lineage of mechanised theatres, like Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005), the format of this work evolved out of theatre projects at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary incubator established in 2016 by the artist.

Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes is the third example of this nineteenth-century optical illusion utilising a pane of glass and strategic lighting to make objects appear or disappear on stage. It will be exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, to coincide with L’Orfeo at the Greek National Opera, in November 2026. The title of the installation derives from Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1904 poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”, fragments of which Kentridge projected as backdrop to his production of L’Orfeo.