William

Kentridge

in

Prague:

Staging

Ambiguity

in

the

City

of

Kafka.

At Kunsthalle Praha, the South African artist’s expansive new exhibition embraces contradiction, memory, and the productive space of not knowing.

William Kentridge has long insisted on the value of uncertainty. In ‘The Battle Between YES and NO’, opening at Kunsthalle Praha, this commitment unfolds across a sprawling exhibition that resists chronology in favour of association, tension, and overlap. Bringing together early charcoal animations, theatrical installations, and recent film works, the exhibition offers a dense and immersive encounter with one of the most influential artistic practices of the past four decades.

Kentridge’s work has consistently navigated the unstable terrain between personal memory and political history. Born in Johannesburg during apartheid, he developed a visual language in dialogue with South Africa’s fractured realities, yet it has always extended beyond them. Questions of power, migration, responsibility, and the limits of knowledge circulate throughout his films and installations, where erasure and revision are not simply aesthetic strategies but ethical positions.

In Prague, these concerns find a new resonance through an explicit engagement with Franz Kafka. The newly commissioned ‘A Letter to Felice’ anchors the exhibition, drawing on fragments from Kafka’s letters, diaries, and fiction to construct a layered, six-act work that culminates in a silent film. Here, Kentridge himself appears masked as Kafka, collapsing historical distance while invoking the writer’s enduring preoccupation with alienation and bureaucratic absurdity.