Today from our friends at Glasstire, we bring you a review of William Kentridge’s five films that are part of the exhibition Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence at the Menil in Houston. Author Terry Mahaffey notes, “Kentridge’s use of celluloid film projection and traditional drawing methods feels unconventional, even avant-garde, lending the work a cinematic quality that intensifies the evocative response to the politically charged subject matter.” This article was originally published on December 6, 2014.

William Kentridge. Drawing for the film Other Faces (Crowds in City Streets), 2011;
charcoal and colored pencil on paper; 27.5 x 48 in.

As part of the meticulously curated Menil exhibition Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, five animated short films from William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection series are on display. Four of the five were made between 1989 and 2003, and the fifth is a more recent work from 2011. All feature the post-apartheid South African industrialist and land developer—Soho Eckstein—as protagonist.

Born in Johannesburg in 1955, Kentridge is perhaps South Africa’s best-known artist. His early education was in politics and African studies, and he later studied at the Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris. As an artist, his background in theater is obvious, performing Shostakovich’s operatic transposition of Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose to wide acclaim in New York and Lyon, France. But his continued interest in politics is evident as well, not only in that production, but certainly also in his film works.

Read the full article here.