Never before seen in New Zealand, City Gallery is excited to be hosting the spectacular five channel video work, The Refusal of Time by William Kentridge. Combining the magic of theatre, film, sculpture, drawing, music and dance, the 30 minute installation addresses the elusive nature of time, and our political and personal efforts to control or deny it. it's the South African artist's most moving and spectacular work to date.
This must-see immersive experience seems to be powered by a pumping, breathing, accordion-like sculpture in the middle of the room – The Elephant. The Refusal of Time addresses different ways of understanding and measuring time (from Newton to String Theory) and combines different cinematic processes (animated drawing, live action and pixelated motion). Footage includes giant ticking metronomes, bicycle wheels, the artist clambering over chairs and a shadowy march of figures that carry and haul all manner of items including a bathtub. Walking in file and hunched over, the melancholic procession moves from screen to screen eventually encircling the viewer with their cargo.
William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work. His work draws on the history of art and the histories of the world as well as his own personal experiences of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. One of the most compelling and acclaimed artists of our time, Kentridge has become recognised for his unique, diverse and prolific artistic practice which includes the production of animated films, drawings, sculpture, tapestry as well as opera and theatre works. His work combines visually seductive imagery with probing explorations of the interwoven and often painful histories of science, humanism, colonialism, and globalisation. In 2010, Kentridge directed a new production of Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera which was widely praised by critics and also won acclaim for his 2005 production of Mozart's The Magic Flute.
The Refusal of Time developed out of conversations between Kentridge and Harvard University science historian Peter Galison about the way science is riddled with poetic metaphors. It was realised for Documenta 13 in 2012, in collaboration with South African filmmaker Catherine Meyburgh, composer Philip Miller and dancer Dada Masilo.
Miller, who has been working with Kentridge for over a decade, is famed for synthesising diverse musical traditions, including classical music, modern atonal music and South African folk music. His soundscape is rich in menacing tuba drones, breathing sounds, early 20th century songs, and the ghostly voices of shortwave Numbers Stations. The soundtrack is projected through looming, old-fashioned, movie-set megaphones.
The Refusal of Time has been acquired by major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, San Francisco MoMA, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth (who has lent it to City Gallery). It was recently shown at the Metropolitan, and featured in the 2014 Perth International Arts Festival. Kentridge has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including the retrospective William Kentridge: Five Themes at Museum of Modern Art (2010) which travelled extensively in the United States, Europe, and Israel from 2009 to 2012; the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2010); the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009). His work has also been exhibited in major international exhibitions such as Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 10 (1997) and the Venice Biennale in 2005, 1999, and 1993.
Awards include the 1999/2000 Carnegie Prize (1999), the Kaiserring Kunstpreis der Stadt Goslar (2003), the Oskar-Kokoschka-Preis (2008), and the 26th Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2010). He has received honorary doctorates from institutions including the Royal College of Art, London (2010), Rhodes University, South Africa (2008), and the University of the Witwatersrand (2004).
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
