William Kentridge presents his new video series on artistic freedom in Venice

For his new exhibition at theArsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, April 17 through Nov. 24, 2024, South African artist William Kentridge, famous for his animated shorts, sculptures, and plays, in collaboration with curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is premiering his new nine-episode video series entitled Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot. Structured in short thirty-minute episodes and originally intended to be made available to the public as an online series, the show is an experiment in physical embodiment and phenomenological experience of the real in the digital age, as well as a reflection on what might be happening in an artist’s brain and studio today. Art-house film distribution house MUBI has acquired global streaming rights to the nine-episode series, created and directed by William Kentridge, produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of The Office Performing Arts + Film, Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films and the William Kentridge Studio, and curated by Walter Murch, Janus Fouché and ana Marović. These works, intended primarily for online, mobile device or television enjoyment, are meant to be an ode to artistic freedom, while prophetically noting the lack of freedom typical of our enclosed spaces in the digital age. They also want to highlight how the very activity of making marks with materials constructs the self in the process of creation. Moreover, the relationship between painting and sheet music, as well as between dance and drawing, becomes a form of mental gymnastics or yoga for the brain, exercises to expand and enhance human intelligence in our age when the prostheses of artificial intelligence and the increasing use of social media end up dangerously atrophying our cognitive and emotional capacities.

The Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, under the leadership of philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe, is a dedicated research and exhibition space that focuses on the critique of spectacle and the analysis of the politics of representation. Despite his interest in Situationism, Kentridge often drew inspiration for his visual vocabulary, costumes, and designs from earlier periods, particularly Dada, Bauhaus, and constructivist precursors, including Oskar Schlemmer’s Ballet Triadique (1916-1922); some of these costumes appear in the eighth episode of the series (Oh to Believe in Another World), which refers to the fall from grace of utopian intellectuals in general through the story of Dmitri Shoshtakovic, and is also the title of a 2022-2023 performanceand installation by Kentridge.

“The filming began during the first lockdown and the studio mimicked the enclosed spaces of the Covid,” explains William Kentridge, “but the studio is also an expanded head, a chamber of thoughts and reflections where all the drawings, photos, and remnants on the studio walls become these same thoughts.”

“Kentridge’s art is rooted in South Africa, where the artist continues to live and create the majority of his work,” said Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “and stems from an attempt to address the nature of human emotions and memory, as well as the relationship between knowledge, desire, ethics, practice and responsibility. Kentridge investigates how our identities are shaped through our shifting ideas of history and place, looking at how we construct our stories as forms of collage and what we do with them, both individually and in collectivity. Hers is an elegiac yet mocking art that explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society, even in the absence of utopian visions for the future, and provides an acerbic satirical commentary on our society, while proposing a way of seeing life as a continuous process of change and uncertainty rather than as a fact-controlled world. In this new series, Kentridge’s alter egos and doppelgängers debate a number of questions: how does memory work? What creates the self? Why does history always go wrong? One could interpret the works as an inversion of the obsessive narcissistic division of personalities in our age of avatars on social media into forms of quiet psychoanalysis.”

On Friday, April 19 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Kentridge will also speak at Ca’ Foscari University Venice. The meeting will take place in the historic Aula Magna Silvio Trentin at Ca’ Dolfin where a series of paintings by Tiepolo were once located, theatrically depicting battles and scenes from the expansion of the Roman Empire, including the Punic War, before they were removed in the late 19th century: a theme that captures the artist’s poetics with respect to the sense of loss and history.

The exhibition is supported by Goodman Gallery, Lia Rumma Gallery and Hauser & Wirth.

Image: Freeze frame from Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, Episode 4: Finding One’s Fate (2022; HD Video, 31 min 02 sec). Courtesy William Kentridge Studio

William Kentridge presents his new video series on artistic freedom in Venice

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