Largest Kentridge exhibit set for Cape Town

Artist William Kentridge’s large retrospective titled ‘A Poem That is Not Our Own’ is showing in Basel. Mark Stiebel caught up with him for an interview

YOU have a major exhibition in Basel during Basel Week, which is the pinnacle of the global contemporary art market. Do you feel that you are riding on the crest of a wave having made it in the international art world?

The wave, if you are going to describe it in that way, goes back 20 years from 1997. A documentary rather than an art fair is a more interesting place to see it from. But in terms of South Africans’ feeling like other things are better, what it is to be in a post-colony – when you go through university you discover that the education that Wits gave was the equal of any international university, the lecturers we had were as good as any elsewhere.

The art-making that was here was as interesting as that being made elsewhere but because it wasn’t in the magazines or museums one felt self-conscious and embarrassed by it. So that is something which one has to fix in oneself rather than in the world.

There is no doubt that as you know with Fugard and others, when you get recognition overseas then suddenly you get a different kind of recognition where you live, but that’s not just South Africa but the same in Australia, South America and everywhere that’s not Europe and the United States.

I think that pressure of having to make it from outside and really having to finding an interest in the work, pushes the work in the peripheries, and I would say that South Africa is very much in the margins of the art world, in interesting and good ways.

Now days for the last 20 years, curators from other parts of the world have been much more interested in travelling to South Africa, to South America, to Asia to look for work which has not been made necessarily in Berlin or New York. So in that sense I am the beneficiary of a different zeitgeist in the art world where it is possible to do all the work in South Africa and have it seen both in South Africa and have it seen in museums and institutions outside of South Africa.

What can Capetonians look forward to in your new exhibitions at Zeitz Mocaa and Norval Foundation in August?

The exhibition combined is by far the largest exhibition of my work I have ever put on anywhere.

There is a lot more work being put together than has ever been seen before. Even this large exhibition in Basel is not on the same scale. It features a lot of early works, for myself to remember where it started right up to work which has just been finished now in readiness for the exhibition and some of which will only be ready a week before the exhibition opens. I hope what it shows is the way of making work and process of making work and the possibility of making work.

There are several rooms where we show the process of making the woodcuts, doing the tapestries and doing the etchings to make it not astonishing that these things arrive as if from nowhere. They are a series of quite practical activities, quite stupid activities in themselves at the end of which they may add up to something more than the blindness of their making.

Is your latest production of The Head & the Load going to be staged in Africa?

This huge project is about World War I set on a wide stage with many performers. We are hoping to be in Johannesburg at the end of February.

◆ The exhibit will be at Zeitz Mocaa and Norval Foundation in August.

| JULIAN SALINAS SOUTH African artist William Kentridge.