PRESENTATION: William Kentridge-Finally Memory Yields

Considered one of the most powerful voices in art today, William Kentridge emerged as an artist during the apartheid regime in South Africa. Grounded in the violent absurdity of that period in his country’s history, Kentridge’s practice spans drawing, collage, animation, performance, theatre, tapestry and sculpture. Significant to the exhibition, a selection of artworks from the Naomi Milgrom Collection presents a union of art, ideology, history and memory formed throughout the artist’s career.

By Efi Michalarou
Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

William Kentridge’s solo exhibition “Finally Memory Yields” in Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris spans both at the main gallery and the bookshop, includes a projection of the animated film, “Sibyl” (2020), large unique drawings, as well a selection of new etchings and linocuts. On the ground floor, three new Indian ink drawings of trees are exhibited for the first time: “Finally Memory Yields”, “Not Everywhere But Anywhere” and “An Argument Mired in Nostalgia” are among the largest trees ever created by Kentridge. The trees within his practice were born of two memories and misassociations; a friend describing creating a T-shirt for a companion, heard by William “as a tree search”; and his father representing Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli and others in the South African Treason Trial of 1956-1961, which his son misconstrued as “trees and tiles”. Decades later, whilst working with Indian ink to create images of more precise objects, Kentridge discovered the serendipitous beauty of using a splayed paintbrush to create branches and leaves, wherein the virtue of ‘the bad brush’ is precisely that it”. Kentridge invariably layers multiple pages of paper to create these works – the ‘tiles’ of his trees – so that, in addition to the intricate foliage of ‘the bad brush’, a dense composite of distractions and associations assimilates and grows with it. The pages themselves are of course the product of actual growth, and Kentridge puts it, “trees led to books, and then on to paper and the words they hold (or release)”. This sense of myriad layers – paper, words and imagery – and specifically a proliferation of oak tree leaves with apparently incidental associations is evident in Kentridge’s film “Sibyl”, projected in the lower level of the gallery.

“Waiting for the Sibyl”  created in collaboration with choral director and dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd, one of South Africa’s leading progressive pianists and composers, is a piece for nine performers that unfolds in a series of 6 short scenes, interrupted and revealed by the dropping and raising of the front curtain. The work incorporates signature elements of Kentridge’s visionary practice (projection, live performance, recorded music, dance / movement, and shadows cast by the performers against a hand-painted backdrop) to tell the story of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl. She would write out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf and place it at the mouth of her cave on a pile of others’ fates. But when you went to retrieve it, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, leaving you uncertain if you were learning another’s fate or your own. The fact that your fate would be known, but you couldn’t know it, is the deep theme of our relationship of dread, of expectation, of foreboding towards the future. Unspoken throughout but hovering over the opera is the notion that our contemporary Sibyl is the algorithm that will predict our future, our health, whether we’ll get a bank loan, whether we’ll live to 80, what our genetics will be. This certainty of an implacable mechanism that determines our outcome is juxtaposed against the desire for a more human connection to our destiny, an instinct to believe in the possibility of something other than the machine to guide us in how we see our future. The work is a profound, jarring, playful, and visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive in our current moment in history, grappling afresh with humanity’s primordial task of making sense of the inherently tragic state of always knowing, yet never knowing, where our end will lead us; the cursed and blessed consciousness that makes us human.

Photo: William Kentridge, Sibyl, 2020, Single channel HD film; 9 min. 59 sec., Edition of 9 plus 3 artist’s proofs, © William Kentridge, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 79 Rue du Temple, Paris, France. Duration: 18/10-27/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com