Goodman Gallery presents To Cross One More Sea, featuring the African debut of William Kentridge's film of the same name, which premiered at LUMA Arles in 2024, alongside a selection of related works.
Through a series of drawings, works on paper, small sculptures, puppets and film, the exhibition expands on Kentridge’s recent projects, including the chamber opera The Great Yes, The Great No and episodic film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot.
The Great Yes, The Great No is a Surrealist, part-historical, part-fictional journey that sees figures such as André Breton, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Josephine Baker, Frantz Fanon, the Nardal sisters, Léon-Gontran Damas, Joséphine Bonaparte, and others navigating an ocean journey from Marseilles to Martinque, escaping Vichy France.
The three-screen film version of the performance, To Cross One More Sea, unfolds across several chapters of their journey exploring themes of displacement and forced journeys of past and present.
Artworks
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Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Still Life: Her Sleep Was Everything), is a new unique piece that enters into dialogue with Kentridge’s film series which debuted during the Venice Biennale in spring 2024 and is now streaming on MUBI.
Aphorism and Aviary, displayed for the first time in this exhibition, are sculptural works that continue Kentridge’s exploration of symbolism and language through a series of bronze ‘glyphs’ which will be a key element of his Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo show this June.
The newest in the series, following Cursive (2020), Lexicon (2017) and Paragraph II (2018), these small bronzes began as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-out silhouettes, and then, as Kentridge puts it, he took “something as immaterial as a shadow and gave it heft”.
The sequence of glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences that give a glimpse of “the possibility of meaning in their order”, which can then be immediately denied and reconstructed when they are rearranged.
Several new puppets, made with Greta Goiris, crafted from old tools, found materials and objects, draw a connection between the exhibition and Kentridge’s expansive work premised on Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, Oh To Believe in Another World, a film interweaving a series of images and narratives set in a cardboard model of an imagined Soviet museum, spanning events from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the death of Stalin in 1953.
In To Cross One More Sea, Kentridge continues his use of the puppet as a performative object in the relaying of complex stories. The particular character of each puppet emerges from working with the form of the tools and found materials to create an anthropomorphic figure.
Artist Bio
William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.
In 2024, in Venice, Kentridge premiered a new nine-episode video series, 'Self-Portriait as a Coffee Pot,' - a site-specific installation curated by long-time collaborator and curator Carolyn Christov Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Following this, in October, MUBI presented: William Kentridge’s, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ Premiere in New York.
In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera, 'The Great Yes, The Great No,' which debuted at LUMA Arles in July 2024, the solo exhibition, 'Je n’attends plus' (I’m Not Waiting Any Longer) presents a collection of major works, some of which had not been seen in Europe before.
Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. An iteration of Kentridge's Royal Academy survey opened at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in May 2024. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, 'In Praise of Shadows,' at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023, this exhibition traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Luma Foundation, France (2024); Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999, 2005, 2010); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2010); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2015); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019). The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002, 1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).
Collections include: MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.
Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
