An exploration of phrases and excerpts that inspire a major contemporary artist.   Over the past several years, renowned South African artist William Kentridge has made a collection of particular phrases and sentences that have called out to him from the pages of whatever he has been reading. And these phrases, which he has written into a studio notebook titled Words, have been put to work in many of his artistic projects. Kentridge has often begun a project by paging through the notebook, waiting for a phrase to claim its place in the new work. The text excerpts come from many sources: Aimé Césaire, Yehuda Amichai, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Setswana proverbs, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto, and a range of eastern European poets. This volume presents a selection made from the notebook, with phrases arranged neither randomly nor with a clear agenda but finding a space in between. Cleverly designed by the artist and beautifully produced, Words is a thought-provoking collection that provides a window to the mind of a contemporary creative genius.  

Presenting unique and in-depth collaborations and editions with leading contemporary artists, Parkett has been the foremost international journal on contemporary art for nearly two decades. Issue #63 features collaborations with Tracey Emin (Great Britain), William Kentridge (South Africa), and Gregor Schneider (Germany), three artists whose highly personal works affect viewers in an evocative manner, yet through strikingly different means. Emin bares her soul from the inside out, in her confessional multimedia photographs, drawings, videos, and installations. Kentridge's highly-charged films, drawings, sculptures, and theatrical productions analyze the history of his native South Africa and the implications and legacy of apartheid. And finally, Schneider's inside-out abodes turn the seemingly cozy and reassuring context of home into a haunting maze of opened and closed rooms, claustrophobic corridors and tunnels, and impenetrable windows and doors. Each of these artists draws us into their private worlds, diminishing the boundaries between artist and audience.

In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, published in 2015, renowned artist William Kentridge and scholar Rosalind C. Morris brought us an unprecedented collaboration, taking pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation in South Africa and transforming them into something entirely new. While Kentridge contributed breathtaking landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created, Morris plumbed the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Now, they revisit those ruined mines, with a visual and verbal addendum that provides an account of the ongoing metamorphosis of the world that gold mines created. Kentridge works on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, while Morris mines the unsaid in order to make it understandable. Together they've created a landmark book that chronicles the exploitation of African communities and sheds further light on global Black history. With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world.

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, a guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now. For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result That Which Is Not Drawn;is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist's techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation. "That's the thing about a conversation," Kentridge reflects. "The activity and the performance, whether it's the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It's not just a report of something you know." And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.

In June of 2010, William Kentridge asked Denis Hirson to join him in a public conversation at the opening of Cinq Thèmes, the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Jeu du Paume in Paris. So fruitful was this event that the two decided to have further conversations, public and private, whenever the time and the occasion seemed right. Nine engagements followed, allowing them to explore at great length the many issues and themes arising from Kentridge’s work. These conversations, in which a writer and an artist grapple with the enormous complexities of making art, grow out of a friendship that stretches back to the 1980s and that is deeply entwined in the fortunes of the city where they both grew up and the country that is the wellspring of their work.

Born in Cambridge in 1951, Denis Hirson lived in South Africa until the age of twenty-two, studying social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 1975 he settled in France, where he has worked as an actor and lecturer at the École Polytechnique. He has written seven books, almost all of them at the frontier between prose and poetry and concerned with memories of South Africa in the time of apartheid. The most recent of these is the novel The Dancing and the Death on Lemon Street. He has also assembled and edited three anthologies of South African writing, including In the Heat of Shadows: South African poetry 1996–2013. Ma langue au chat, a book in French about the delight and torture experienced by an Anglophone when speaking and writing in French, is forthcoming from Les Éditions du Seuil in October 2017.

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955. He is a graphic artist, filmmaker and theatre artist renowned for his humanist and poetic perspective on apartheid, colonialism and totalitarianism, and on their lingering effects. Best known for his allegorical animations of charcoal drawings that he erases and appends frame by frame, Kentridge has explored disciplines ranging from sculpture to books, stereoscope to opera. His works are included in numerous international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Albertina Museum, Vienna. His acclaimed production of Wozzeck travels to the Metropolitan Opera, New York, for the 2019–20 season.

The White Horse (1819) by John Constable (1776-1837) depicts a tow-horse being ferried across the river Stour in Suffolk, just below Flatford Lock at a point where the tow-path switched banks. Constable, who described the scene as as placid representation of a serene, grey morning, summer, went on in later years to comment: There are generally in the life of an artist perhaps one, two or three pictures, on which hang more than usual interest-- this is mine. A scholarly essay by Frick curator Aimee Ng, is paired with a piece by artist William Kentridge, who writes about finding inspiration in Constable's nostalgic world. The painting was well received when it was shown at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1819, and it was purchased by Constable's friend Archdeacon John Fisher. Constable bought back the painting in 1829 and kept it the rest of his life.There is a full-scale oil sketch for The White Horse in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a world-wide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. The films introduced a significant character in contemporary fiction: Soho Eckstein, a Highveld mining magnate and Kentridge's alter ego. In The Soho Chronicles, Kentridge's brother, Matthew, shares a never-before-seen perspective on both William and Soho that sheds new light on the creator and his alter ego. Richly illustrated, the book includes a special feature that connects with smartphones and tablets. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration using the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining, while Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account, drawing together the stories of migrant laborers and charting the flows of capital and desire.

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons "is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of drawing lessons.

Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato s cave to the Enlightenment s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons "is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge"makes us more aware of the mechanisms and deceptions through which we construct meaning in the world."

Explore William Kentridge's remarkable performance piece, The Head & The Load, and discover how music, dance, writing, and fine art are combined to tell the haunting story of Africans during WWI. For over thirty years, William Kentridge has been combining fine arts, performance, theatre, and opera to create dreamlike, political, and humanist works. His installations , films, and drawings often deal with the political situation in South Africa, apartheid, and the consequences of colonialism. This book gives an in-depth examination of his performance piece The Head & The Load, which explores the role of Africa during World War I. Throughout the war, more than one million Africans carried provisions and military equipment in hazardous conditions for British, French, and German troops at minimal or no pay. William Kentridge tells the story of these African porters who ensured the success of the victors, but remain in the shadows. This history, rarely studied today, unfolds in a staged tableau combining music, dance, acting, screenings, and mechanized sculptures. The book includes photos and text from the performance, essays, and artworks created specifically by Kentridge to complement the play. Accompanied by an international cast of singers, actors, and dancers, and with music composed by Philip Miller, The Head & The Load is a powerful and multifaceted work that reconsiders colonial history and its repercussions in today's world.

Covering 40 years of South African artist William Kentridge's (born 1955) internationally acclaimed production in drawing, stop-frame animation, video, prints, sculpture, tapestry and large-scale installation, Why Should I Hesitate stands as a definitive statement on his vast oeuvre. This deluxe production, published in an edition of 1,800 copies, is comprised of two slipcased volumes with a unique print in lapis lazuli.

The title references Kentridge’s primary practice of drawing and how this core activity informs and enables his studio practice. It also references the impact of individual action on history and the reverse―how history shapes the contemporary and the future―and serves as a commentary on various shifting hegemonies of power politics, economies, language and the authority to narrate history.

The two volumes showcase two complementary exhibitions, held at the Norval Foundation and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), Cape Town, which together form the largest, most comprehensive presentation of Kentridge’s work, anywhere, ever.

Why Should I Hesitate?: Sculpture, at Norval Foundation, is the first exhibition to address Kentridge’s output as a sculptor, from the props used in his operas to his recent, monumental bronze sculptures, premiering as part of this exhibition. As an extension of Why Should I Hesitate?: Sculpture, the publication includes a visual index of his sculptural practice; a photo essay charting the development of his large Lexicon sculptures; and a comprehensive essay by Columbia University’s Dr. David Freedberg, which locates Kentridge’s work within several key artistic movements.

Held at Zeitz MOCAA, Why Should I Hesitate?: Putting Drawings to Work spans more than forty years of art making, with a focus on Kentridge’s studio practice. The accompanying publication includes essays, conversations, a lecture, and a meticulous timeline of the history of 20th-century South Africa, interwoven with a chronology of the artist’s life, work and thinking over the decades