William KentridgeKABOOM!
KABOOM! wastes little time introducing itself. The title sets the scene for the exhibition, which largely draws on work produced for two recent performance projects by William Kentridge backdropped by war: the critically acclaimed, The Head & the Load, which premiered at London’s Tate Modern in July, and the celebrated 2017 production of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck.
The exhibition is organised around Kentridge’s ongoing interest in juxtaposing fragments for both coherent and absurdist ends. The result is a diverse display of work in several mediums including a new three-channel film installation related to The Head & The Load, never-before exhibited charcoal drawings used for projection in that production, as well as other drawings produced for the opera, Wozzeck. In addition, KABOOM! features composite drawings made for Kentridge’s recent performance of Kurt Schwitters’s 1932 sound poem, Ursonate, at Performa 17 in New York and a new set of bronze sculptures that form part of his Lexicon series.
‘Is it possible to tell a story without telling it through the story of one individual – the girl, the soldier, the hero, standing in for the whole war?’ says Kentridge, reflecting on the creative process behind The Head & The Load.
For his design of Wozzeck, Kentridge drew inspiration from documentary photographs depicting the ravaged First World War battlefields of Flanders. The opera, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2017, tells the story of a homicidal soldier – a tale brought to life by Kentridge through his characteristic charcoal drawings depicting bleak landscapes, denuded of their trees and scarred by shell craters.
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During the production process for Wozzeck Kentridge brought together a group of local performers to workshop the material. ‘There were so many things not used,’ Kentridge recalls of the rehearsals, ‘so much left at the edge of the production… many of the items called to be looked at again, to be brought back onto stage.’ It was from those unused elements that Kentridge would begin development on his next project: The Head & the Load.
A play on the Ghanaian proverb, ‘the head and the load are the troubles of the neck’, this large-scale production expressively speaks to the nearly two million African porters and carriers used by the British, French, and Germans during the First World War in Africa. The Head & The Load takes the form of a processional musical journey and features an international ensemble cast of singers, dancers, and performers accompanied by a chorus of mechanized gramophones alongside multiple film projections and shadow play to create a landscape of immense proportion and imagination.
According to Kentridge, the project explores ‘the contradictions and paradoxes of colonialism that were heated and compressed by the circumstances of the war’. Among the various sources of text used to articulate this story, Kentridge drew on Schwitter’s Ursonate, which was written after the First World War, but remained indebted to the sound poems developed by the Dadaists during the Zurich cabarets in 1916. The work’s use in The Head & The Load speaks to ‘sound of a rational argument hiding a deep irrationality.’
Artist Bio
William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre, and opera productions.
In 2024, in Venice, Kentridge premiered a new nine-episode video series, *Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot* — a site-specific installation curated by long-time collaborator and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Following this, in October, MUBI presented the New York premiere of *William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot*.
In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera, *The Great Yes, The Great No*, which debuted at LUMA Arles in July 2024, the solo exhibition *Je n’attends plus* (*I’m Not Waiting Any Longer*) presented a collection of major works, some of which had not previously been seen in Europe.
Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2022. An iteration of the exhibition opened at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in May 2024. In the same year, Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, *In Praise of Shadows*, at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023, the exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
In 2025, he presented *The Pull of Gravity* at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, marking the first museum presentation outside South Africa to focus on his sculpture.
Most recently, he opened *The Battle Between YES and NO* at Kunsthalle Praha, his first major exhibition in Czechia.
Kentridge’s work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s, including at Kunsthalle Praha (2026); Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2025); Museum Folkwang (2025); LUMA Foundation, France (2024); Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999, 2005, 2010); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2010); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); and Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019). The artist has also participated in major biennales, including Documenta, Kassel (1997, 2002, 2012) and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2005, 2013, 2015).
Public collections include MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town.
Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
