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“High art with a friendly touch” is the spin on publicity for the visual art exhibitions at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this year. Not, perhaps, the most promising of slogans if one was hoping for a more adventurous and considered approach to the visual arts than in previous years. But, as ever, Grahamstown offers an assemblage of the tried and tested with enough standout items to keep people going back for more.

The highest point on the main programme will no doubt be the South African debut of William Kentridge’s new multi-media production, Confessions of Zeno, which will already have played at various European festivals including the Documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel in June. Based on the novel, Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo, the work combines the talents of Kentridge, the Handspring Puppet Company, librettist Jane Taylor and composer Kevin Volans, and incorporates acting, puppetry, singing, a string quartet, animation and projection.

Kentridge, who directs the production, writes: “When I first read [Svevo's novel] some 20 years ago, one of the things that drew me to it was the evocation of Trieste as a rather desperate provincial city at the edge of an empire - away from the centre, the real world. I was intrigued how an Austrian Italian writing in the 1920s could have such a sense of how it felt to be in Johannesburg in the 1980s. In the years following this has persisted. And caused me to return to the book.”

Kentridge continues: “Zeno, the hero of Svevo’s novel, has remarkable self-knowledge. But it is knowledge that is without effect. This absolute inability of self-knowledge to force Zeno to act, or at other times to stop him from acting, feels familiar. People stuck at the edge of a historical project about to implode, stuck waiting for the eruption to happen. The teasing out of our ambiguous sense of place, and the convoluted relation we have to our own sense of self, form the starting point for the work of transforming the book from someone else’s text into a piece of my own making.”

Kentridge employs the device of double projection, previously used in the film Stereoscope (1999), in which a screen is split into two images that are initially almost identical but increasingly diverge, as a way of “playing with the complex ways we try to structure ourselves as coherent subjects”. The double screen becomes the site of contest between, for example, Zeno’s private, domestic life and the social world with World War I approaching.

Excerpt of Review by Sophie Perryer for ARTTHROB

 

 

Keywords: Confessions of Zeno, National Arts Festival, South-African, William-Kentridge