William

Kentridge

presents

a

site-specific

exhibition

that

is

decidedly

universal

William Kentridge's recent exhibition in Palermo, Sicily, is intricately linked to its location—and has been years in the making. The South African artist first visited the exhibition‘s venue, the Museum and Library of Palazzo Branciforte, back in 2017. There, one experiences not only the historical collection of Fondazione Sicilia displayed within the modernised palace—which opened to the public following a 2012 refurbishment by Italian architect Gae Aulenti—but also the almost palpable traces of the Renaissance palace’s tangled history—a history that includes, from example, its usage from the 1800s until the 1980s as a pawn shop for Palermo’s indigent majority.

In this city on Europe’s southern edges, closer to North Africa than it is to Rome, Kentridge offers an anguished show that considers disparate strings of fates, plights, and misfortunes, and that yet somehow—and this has always been the artist’s unique genius—is also uplifting. In the histories of suffering, Kentridge highlights our connected human experience. The exhibition’s linchpin is the new sound and video installation You Whom I Could Not Save, which lends its title to the show; the exhibition also comprises 16 previously unpublished drawings, the video work Sibyl (2020), several painted bronze sculptures, and a series of five large tapestries featuring human silhouettes set against archival maps of Europe. William Kentridge’s tapestry titled Cicero (2014), depicting the Roman stateman’s bust set against an 1894 map of Italy, has been acquired by the Fondazione Sicilia, which manages this and other cultural institutions in Sicily, for the museum’s permanent collection.