Avenali Lectures

William Kentridge, Avenali Chair in the Humanities 2008-2009

“Learning from the Absurd”
Sunday, March 15, 2009
5:00 pm | Hertz Concert Hall

Follow-up panel discussion with William Kentridge
Monday, March 16, 2009
12:00 pm |Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

Panelists: Kaja Silverman (Rhetoric and Film Studies), Larry Rinder (Berkeley Art Museum), and Mark Rosenthal (Norton Museum of Art)
Moderated by Anthony J. Cascardi, Townsend Center Director

webcast of talk

 

With an innovative use of charcoal drawing, prints, collages, stop-animation, film and theater, South African artist William Kentridge’s work continues to attract international recognition. Especially distinctive are his hand-drawn films, which are created using a technique he calls "stone-age filmmaking.” Through a painstaking process of photographing his successive charcoal marks and erasures on a page, Kentridge creates a mysterious and subtle moving picture. In both these “drawings for projection” and his other work, Kentridge explores themes of apartheid, colonialism, social conflict, and both personal and cultural memory. While much of his early art centered on his own homeland, the artist’s newer work expands to address similar themes in different contexts, such as colonialism in Namibia and Ethiopia, or the cultural history of post-revolutionary Russia.

Since his work appeared in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany in 1997, Kentridge’s work has been featured internationally in solo exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art in New York, both Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Chicago Art Institute, the Tate Modern Gallery in London, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Kentridge has also directed and designed many theater productions, and he has collaborated with Handspring Puppet Company, creating multi-media pieces using puppets, live actors and animation, since 1992. He has received many honorary degrees and awards, including the Standard Bank Young Artist Award and the Carnegie Medal.

Kentridge’s appointment as Townsend Avenali lecturer coincides with the March 14th premier of William Kentridge: Five Themes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition brings viewers up to date on the artist's work over the past decade, exploring how his subject matter has evolved from the specific context of South Africa to more universal stories. Kentridge will also present his lecture-format solo performance “I am not me, the horse is not mine” at SFMOMA on March 14, 2009.

Part of the Forum on the Humanities and the Public World.

Links:

Exhibitions:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March 2009

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Marian Goodman Gallery

Greg Kucera Gallery, Inc.

Videos:
Automatic Writing at the New Museum of Contemporary Art

An installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

Books and Articles:
Article in the San Francisco Chronicle

Art and Publications at David Krut Publishing

Article on Culture Base website

Interviews:
Interview with Lilian Tone