The production 'Oh To Believe in Another World' expands on decades of critical engagement with life and culture under the Soviet Union by Kentridge. The artist's cinematic aesthetic is based on the history of the medium itself, from stop-motion animation to early special effects. Drawing, in particular the dynamics of erasing and redrawing on top of it, has been a central element of his many works in the fields of animation and filmmaking, in which layers of meaning develop only during the process of their creation. After his stage production of Shostakovich's Nose for the Metropolitan in New York, he returns to the composer to produce this animation set in a seemingly abandoned Soviet museum that is made of cardboard and located on a table in an artist's studio. A tour of the museum's various rooms, which include a community theater hall, a public swimming pool and a quarry surrounded by figures such as Mayakovsky, his mistress Lilya Brik, Trotsky, Shostakovich as a student, his student Elmira Nasirova, Stalin and Lenin. Puppets in an environment in which they must be understood as collages.
