William Kentridge show explores South African roots – DW – 09/02/2025

William Kentridge is one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, his charcoal drawings providing the foundation for multimedia creations combining animation, prints, collages, sculptures, tapestries and even puppets.

He came to global prominence in the late 1980s and 1990s for his animated short films based on drawings that dissected South Africa’s apartheid regime, but also tell personal stories.

To mark the 70th birthday of the Johannesburg-based artist, Germany’s Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Dresden State Art Collections are hosting a major exhibition celebrating Kentridge’s expansive artistic oeuvre.

A still from Kentridge’s animation ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance,’ in which the procession of shadowy characters symbolizes a history of human suffering and injusticeImage: William Kentridge

The retrospective “Listen to the Echo” is spread across several venues and incorporates multifaceted work and methods that explore colonialism, social power and personal responsibility in South Africa and beyond.

Who is William Kentridge?

Born in 1955, Kentridge’s parents were Jewish anti-apartheid lawyers and human rights campaigners. His father, Sydney Kentridge, represented South African leaders such as Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Even though apartheid ended in the 1990s, “the residue of 300 years of exploitation and oppression is still very much with us,” Kentridge told DW in 2016 of an era that remains a key theme in his work.

The “Listen to the Echo” exhibition traces William Kentridge’s artistic development from the late 1970s, when deep racial divisions persisted in his homeland. In addition to drawings and films from the renowned “Drawings for Projection” series that explored the social and political undercurrents of life in apartheid South Africa, the show includes prints, sculptures, tapestries, and multi-channel film installations.

William Kentridge’s ‘Small Atlas Procession’ from 2000, an etching that continues the procession theme described also as a ‘danse macabre’Image: http://dlewisbrowne.co.za/

As part of the exhibition, Dresden’s Kraftwerk Mitte museum is hosting “The Centre for the Less Good Idea,” which was founded by Kentridge and visual artist Bronwyn Lace in Johannesburg as a space for cross-disciplinary ideas combining text, performance, image and dance.

“The Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you,” Kentridge once said of the project that will be reactivated in Dresden alongside a puppet collection that will be brought to life. Works created by Kentridge as a puppet theater director will also be on show.

New sound and video installations, including the film “Oh to Believe in Another World” (2022), themed around the limits of artistic utopias, will also be featured at the Albertinum modern art museum in Dresden.

Utilizing the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Kentridge created a fictional collage of images that illustrates the rise and fall of the Russian avant-garde artist movements during decades of Soviet rule, and plays on the fragile relationship between power and art.

William Kentridge leads a workshop in the Centre for the Less Good Idea in JohannesburgImage: The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Foto: Zivanai Matangi

Exploring ‘your relationship to the world’

“We are delighted that from September onwards we will be presenting works spanning four decades — pieces by an artist who addresses themes such as colonialism and social utopias, and tirelessly campaigns for human rights and human dignity,” said Peter Gorschlüter, the director of Museum Folkwang in Essen.

“We are focusing in particular on the theme of the ‘procession,’ which is a recurring motif in Kentridge’s work,” said Marius Winzeler, interim director general of the Dresden State Art Collections. “To coincide with the opening, a ceremonial procession complete with choir and band will march through downtown Dresden, past one of the most unusual monumental procession paintings, the Dresden Procession of Princes [depicting the history of the local Saxon ruling dynasty].”

The exhibitions in Dresden and Essen are being organized and curated in close collaboration with William Kentridge, who has invested the full breadth of his artistic vision in the shows.

“The idea of being an artist is that all the different mediums are open to you in which to explore the world,” Kentridge said in an interview with the Tate Gallery about his multimedia style. “Which is to say to explore your relationship to the world as an artist.”

Listen to the Echo runs from September 4, 2025, to January 18, 2026, at Museum Folkwang in Essen, and from September 6, 2025 at the Dresden State Art Collections.

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp