Mining and colonial suffering: Folkwang shows Kentridge exhibition

The multi-award-winning South African illustrator and film artist William Kentridge is being honored with a major double exhibition in Essen and Dresden. The 70-year-old Kentridge is a multiple documenta and Biennale participant. His main themes are apartheid, racism and the effects of colonialism in his native South Africa.

The show, which has been developed in collaboration with the Dresden State Art Collections, opens in Essen on Thursday under the motto "Listen to the Echo", as announced by Peter Gorschlüter, head of the Museum Folkwang. The Dresden exhibition begins two days later. There is a joint catalog for both exhibitions.

Apartheid and colonialism major themes

At the end of last year, Kentridge received the international Folkwang Prize in Essen, endowed with 10,000 euros. The Essen exhibition shows around 160 exhibits from five decades, including prints, sculptures, tapestries and film installations.

On display, for example, are short films developed from Kentridge's drawings about Johannesburg as a mining town - the hard work underground, which was almost exclusively done by black people, as the museum director said. The drawings and films had made Kentridge famous worldwide since the late 1980s.

The artist himself had traveled to Essen for a preview of his show. He explained that thousands of people are still mining for gold around Johannesburg today - albeit illegally with hammers and chisels and without any health protection, now that the professional mines have long since relocated.

Witnesses to the Herero uprising

One of Kentridge's main works is the mechanical miniature stage "Black Box/Chambre Noir", which combines images of historical testimonies to the suppression of the Herero uprising in 1904 in what was then German South West Africa (Namibia), with tens of thousands of dead, with animations by the artist. Music from Mozart's "Magic Flute" can be heard at times. The work now on show in Essen is normally on display at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark; it has not been seen in Germany for many years.

Also on show is a film installation ("Kaboom") about African men, women and children who were forced to support colonial powers as porters during the First World War. A very recent work, the film installation "To cross one more Sea" (2024), commemorates the escape of 350 people from the Nazis from Marseille to Martinique during the Second World War.

Kentridge also works as a director and has staged operas such as Mozart's "Magic Flute" at major theatres around the world. At the "Centre for the less good idea" in Johannesburg, which he co-founded in 2016, he promotes up-and-coming artists.