Mining and colonial suffering: Folkwang shows Kentridge exhibition

The Museum Folkwang in Essen is launching a double exhibition on William Kentridge together with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Photo: Oliver Berg/dpa

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.

Mining and colonial suffering: Folkwang shows Kentridge exhibition

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