William Kentridge

William Kentridge, born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, continues to live and work in his homeland, where his art explores the intricate relationship between personal desires and external societal structures and pressures. His work reflects on the fragility of human existence and the historical and social contexts that shape it.

Kentridge states, “From a thematic point of view, I work with what I feel in the air around me, a mix of personal questions intersecting with broader social issues. Questions that concern what I am living through now or what I saw and experienced last year—responsibility, retribution, recrimination, the problems that arise from those stories embedded in the landscape.”

The work from the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection, a charcoal and pastel on paper from 1995, reflects the artist's distinctive drawing technique and thematic preoccupations with lived experiences and human relationships. This drawing is connected to Felix in Exile, an art film Kentridge created in 1994, just before South Africa's first free elections. At a time when national identity and reckoning with the past evoked painful memories, the film tells the story of Felix Teitelbaum, a man in exile in Paris, emotionally and physically distant from a brutal and capitalist South Africa.

Nandi, a central figure in the charcoal drawing, is a South African woman and land surveyor, tasked with recording her devastated homeland through her sketches. Her drawings capture the bodies of those who have perished in the cycle of violence that plagues her country. Nandi herself is not spared from this destruction, ultimately becoming a victim of the very violence she documents, reclaiming her connection to the land in a tragic twist.

Kentridge poignantly expresses the inextricable link between memory and erasure in his introduction to the film: “In the same way there is no human act that can attempt to forget what has been, so too there is a natural process in the land that, through erosion, growth, decay, attempts to erase even the events of the past.” This reflection encapsulates the central themes of loss, memory, and the ongoing impact of history on both land and people.