Rainbow Reflections

Internationally-acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge's first show in India carries imprints of his homeland's history.

He is a painter, weaver, sculptor and filmmaker, who has been associated with theatre and opera, first as an actor and later as a director and designer. But a closer glimpse at William Kentridge's life shows how his work might be interconnected, leading to one overarching theme — an apartheid-era South Africa, the world the artist grew up in and knows intimately.

"One has to know South Africa's socio-political condition and history to grasp my work fully," says Kentridge. From Louvre, Paris, to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his art has been shown in some of the world's most prestigious museums.

An assortment of Kentridge's work — film installation, drawings, sculptures, prints, tapestries and flip-book films — are on display at Mumbai's Volte Gallery. The exhibition titled "The Poems I Used to Know" is on till March 20. The most celebrated of these is the audio-visual installation I am not Me, the Horse is not Mine, an animation film done in Kentridge's unique way of photographing successive hand-drawn charcoal images.

"I draw them always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet. The images are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes and filming it again," he explains what has become the definitive feature of his work. As a result, instead of the stark white backgrounds of successive sheets of fresh paper, the traces add up to create their own unclear, grey backdrops, dwelling in a bit of both black and white.

There are also two unique sculptures titled World on its Hind Legs and Sculpture for Return, where new images appear every time it is viewed from a different angle. Like everything in Kentridge's art, this too, can perhaps draw poetic justifications from his own past where, by virtue of being a European, he got a ringside view of an apartheid-struck South Africa. "My parents were lawyers, famous for their defence of victims of the apartheid. They gave me the ability to remove myself somewhat from the atrocities there. The cultural boycott of South Africa made it easier for me to find my way as an artist, since I could work quietly on my own," he says.

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