William Kentridge in Amsterdam, Venice, Zurich and Beijing

Five current and upcoming presentations by William Kentridge, including “More Sweetly Play the Dance”, a 45-metre-long frieze exhibited in Amsterdam.

Posted 27 May 15 By Design Indaba African Design • Art & Photography • Film & Animation Creative Work / Design News Comments

William Kentridge’s wide-ranging artistic talent means there is almost always an exhibition or performance of his on somewhere in the world. Next week, we release the full performance-lecture he gave on stage at Design Indaba Conference 2015. Later this week we’ll be featuring Lulu, the opera by Alban Berg for which Kentridge is the stage director, presented by the Dutch National Opera at the National Opera & Ballet. Then there’s the ambitious Notes Towards a Model Opera, which opens 27 June at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and is a comprehensive retrospective spanning 25 years of Kentridge’s output.

If you've ever dreamed of owning a Kentridge artwork, you can purchase a limited-edition print he made especially for Design Indaba for only R15 000 here.

In the meantime, catch the artist's work at these presentations across Europe:

If We Ever Get to Heaven – Until 30 August 2015

Currently on at the EYE Institute, the Netherlands’ national museum for film in Amsterdam, is the exhibition If We Ever Get to Heaven. It is for the first time that such an extensive exhibition featuring a number of installations by Kentridge has been presented in the Netherlands.

Watch the promo video for it here.

Especially for EYE, Kentridge developed “More Sweetly Play the Dance”, a 45-metre-long frieze that depicts an endless parade of figures who collectively form a kaleidoscopic image of people on the move. These are pictures that hit us every day through the media, of people fleeing from hunger, war and sickness, which Kentridge sublimates into an impressive procession that evokes their sadness yet also conveys their vitality.

In addition to this new work, EYE is presenting three other large works by Kentridge, including the impressive film installation on eight screens entitled “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine” from 2008, based on The Nose, a short story by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol from 1836. Also on view is “Other Faces” (2011), the tenth and most recent work in the series Drawings for Projection (1989-2011).

Triumphs & Laments – Until 22 November 2015

Kentridge’s drawings for the polyptych Triumphs & Laments is on show at the Italian National Pavilion, curated by Vincenzo Trione, at the 56th Venice Biennale. They are preliminary sketches for some of the 90 figures that will make up a 500-metre long frieze conceived by him to be placed in Rome on the walls of the banks of the Tiber River between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini. This frieze will show a non-chronological history of Rome, looking at the laments which inevitably accompany any triumph; every triumph as someone else’s disaster. The frieze is due to be completed in 2016 and will be marked by a musical event in collaboration with composer Philip Miller. (Image from Another Africa / Clelia Coussonnet.)

The Nose – From 4 June to 6 September 2015

The Nose at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, is Kentridge’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Switzerland. At the center of his presentation is the eight-part video installation “I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine”, which has previously been shown at MoMA in New York and Tate Modern in London. The work is based on The Nose, the story by Nikolai Gogol that was adapted for an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich around 100 years later. Kentridge looks into the era of the Russian Constructivists and their fight for social and artistic transformation – a transformation that was also a concern of the Zurich Concretists.

What makes the exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv unique is that it is the first to also present little-known works that were produced in the context of the complex video work. These include bronzes, tapestries, drawings, collages and paper sculptures.