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William Kentridge, a master at mixing obscure and diversely-rooted references in his multi-media, forays into the ambiguities of history and memory. “I’m interested in the way politics is at work in the diaries of personal events,” says Kentridge. “When one tries to find a coherent history in modern South Africa, it is all too often a lopsided history.”

Kentridge’s points of reference and sources of inspiration are truly encyclopaedic. Here they range from the shape of an old 78 rpm record, to news paper reports, to a series of 25 bronze sculptures made partly from domestic objects, to the colour of the sky in a particular ceiling fresco by Venetian artist Tiepolo.

The Atlas Procession prints are part of Kentridge’s current preoccupation with the circular format. “I started working with this format, while making some etchings with some friends in Italy. It started as a test in etching inking technique to see who could print a gramophone record as an etching plate and show all the grooves. In the Arrezzo flea market we bought some old 78 rpm records and saw how pristinely we could ink them up. The first set was printed as plain records and then there was engraving and drawing on top of the printing … I came back to that four years later with a new series of prints on Italian living language course rpm records…”

The feel of this procession of characters moving round and round in circles is the exhausting inevitability of human beings constantly moving through time and geography, fleeing wars and longing for home. “There are sections where the procession is celebratory and others in which the characters are more like refugees fleeing. They come from photos one has seen of people moving. People fleeing Rwanda, people in central Europe, people leaving Mozambique: populations on the move. There is a sense of not being grounded. It’s not a procession of the poor or a procession of the rich. It’s a mixture of different people on the move for different reasons,” says Kentridge.
“Since I started doing them I started looking at what people carry in the street, what they push around with them. The most bizarre things get pushed on trolleys through the streets of Johannesburg. Shopping trolleys from Pick ’n’ Pay and Checkers are a standard means of transportation. It’s astonishing the things that people push around or carry on their backs. Human bodies as beasts of burden are still very much with us.”

It is artists who give expression to the hopes and fears of society, and hopefully by taking in this hugely varied exhibition of prints, you will start to get some sense of the kind of polarities and contradictions at play in this society. South Africa is one of the more extreme countries on the planet. We live, like the Germans, with an often unarticulated sense of guilt and horror in relation to our past. Like the Russians we hold our breaths in the face of the future, drinking heavily to drown out the dark rumblings of the statisticians. In between we have proud days. And others when we like to sing and dance and congratulate ourselves on our miraculous new nationhood.

Extract from essay by Alex Dodd

Keywords: David-Krut, jack shirreff, Kentridge, Printmaking, South-African, The Atlas Procession, William-Kentridge, William-Kentridge-Prints