Exploring and championing a breadth of mediums, such as animation, sculpture, performance and drawing, William Kentridge’s complex creations are multifaceted in form, resonating with audiences through their unifying exploration of the very fabric of our existence. Revisiting and reacting to philosophical, historical or political tropes, Kentridge conjures myriad themes in his polymorphic works which are experimental and conceptually rich.

Machines rattle, belch steam and thump. As a subject they permeate Kentridge’s pictorial worlds. Even during Antiquity water and steam power were used to drive automatic machines. Since then, machines have conquered the world. In industrialised times they stand for ingenuity, progress and prosperity. Kentridge’s works call to mind how machines made history.

Brutality; oppression; the gap between rich and poor; the dominance of the white man: these, too, are characteristics of the age of mechanisation and mass production. During the nineteenth century the exploitation of workers knew no bounds. Europe colonised the world. Violence, slavery and injustice took the place of reason, liberty, equality, fraternity. Kentridge tells repeatedly of the failure of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

“The period Singer sewing machines are given voices in a performance enacted in unison, their megaphones synchronised as they take on new and humorous personae in this world. These composites have a Surrealist quality in the unlikely combinations of repeated elements.”

– Owen Martin, Chief Curator of the Norval Foundation (Cape Town, South Africa).