William KentridgeDrawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, Pelican in Flight , 2022
Birds have played a vital role in Kentridge’s practice since his project and production of Mozart’s 'The Magic Flute', with their flying and ‘hovering as ideas’ throughout the piece; and later in several of his films within books, such as ’Soft Dictionary’ and ‘Notes Towards a Model Opera’ in which they continuously flutter and glide across pages; he also created a unique installation of Muybridgean ink on paper birds, flying sequentially like some of these pelicans, for his solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Kentridge retains an abiding sense of how such small but adroit creatures can, ultimately, be more powerful or capable of shaping history than dictators and warring heads of state with all the machinations and weaponry at their disposal. Much like his 'Eurasian Tree Sparrows' whose disappearance under Maoist dictums led to locust larvae flourishing and a self-inflicted famine, and how with his 'Carrier Pigeon’ sculptures, a swift but vulnerable messenger, had on its back the power to shape the course of a battle, Kentridge’s sequential ink ‘Pelican in Flight’ from his ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot’ project, symbolises more than simply that.
As the ultimate examples of birds of burden during times of upheaval, the pelicans that frequent all of East and Southern Africa, echo the hundreds of thousands of young African porters conscripted to carry all manner of heavy machinery, weaponry, and vainglorious objects for mile after pointless mile in his ‘The Head & the Load’, the remarkable World War 1 'parade opera’ performing initially in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, then in New York, Miami, Johannesburg and Amsterdam. So, one can imagine the ancestors of these creatures that, in fact and folklore, can carry so much in their beaks, who reappear in the ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot’ episode dedicated to that project (entitled ‘A Harvest of Devotion’) would have looked on in empathy at man’s inhumanity to man - and, given their peculiarities, also armed with Kentridge’s Dadaist humour and searing wit.
