William Kentridge - 2nd hand reading, 2013, vidéo, dessins au fusain réalisés dans un livre puis filmés. ‘Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass’, William Kentridge, 1990, 2m40x7m50, 11 feuilles de papier en éventail, première procession, This is a large drawing on a series of eleven sheets of paper, displayed as a montage in an arc formation.
It depicts a procession of people moving from right to left. They include bare-chested, black South African miners wearing helmets with a torch-light on the front, a bandaged one-legged man on a crutch, a worker bowed under the weight of an industrial burden, a suited man in a cloth cap shouting into a megaphone, a naked woman and a couple of unidentifiable figures with open umbrellas. ‘Felix in Exile’, William Kentridge, 1994.
Summary Kentridge makes short animation films from large-scale drawings in charcoal and pastel on paper.
Each drawing, which contains a single scene, is successively altered through erasing and redrawing and photographed in 16 or 35mm film at each stage of its evolution. Remnants of successive stages remain on the paper, and provide a metaphor for the layering of memory which is one of Kentridge's principal themes. The films in this series, titled Drawings for Projection (see Tate T07482-5 and T07480-81), are set in the devastated landscape south of Johannesburg where derelict mines and factories, mine dumps and slime dams have created a terrain of nostalgia and loss.
Kentridge's repeated erasure and redrawing, which leave marks without completely transforming the image, together with the jerky movement of the animation, operate in parallel with his depiction of human processes, both physical and political, enacted on the landscape. Felix in Exile - William Kentridge. William Kentridge, Remembering the Treason Trial, 2013. Remembering the Treason Treal, (souvenir du procès pour trahison) 2013, 63 lithographie sur papier, 193.04 x 179.71 cm. Le procès de la trahison.