William

Kentridge

Reflects

on

What

It

Means

to

Be

a

South

African

Artist

For nearly five decades, whether in drawing, painting, sculpture, video, theater or opera, William Kentridge, 70, has explored the history of violence and its effects on humanity. Often he makes charcoal or ink drawings of scenes of South Africa, where he was born and has lived nearly all of his life, and where the fallout from colonialism and apartheid persists, though he’s just as likely to look further afield. Yet despite what the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakgiev calls its “ethical bearing,” Kentridge’s work isn’t didactic. His recent chamber opera “The Great Yes, the Great No” (2024), with music written with the composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu, a frequent collaborator, is set on a ship that, in 1941, sailed from Marseille to Martinique, carrying intellectuals away from Vichy France. In Kentridge’s Surrealist telling, the passengers hail from various eras; at one point, Joséphine Bonaparte and Josephine Baker dance an unlikely duet.