William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981–82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms. [1]

[1] //art21.org/artist/william-kentridge/

Artist, William Kentridge: My name is William Kentridge. I'm an artist, and I live and work in Johannesburg, on the Southern edge of Africa.

The films that I make come out of the brutalized society that Apartheid has left in its wake. This film uses a lot of images, which are really forensic photographs of people who died months before South Africa's first Democratic election in 1994. There's a huge amount of violence just in the run-up to the election.

The film title "Felix in Exile" really came from the wordplay that exile and Felix are almost anagrams of each other.

The films start as drawing. Drawing is the heart of all the work. I start with an image that I feel I know, or want to work with. And hope that in the process of making that drawing, other ideas and other images will suggest themselves.

The woman in "Felix in Exile" started off as a very minor part in the film. And as I drew it, her role and importance grew and grew until she in fact became the heart of the narrative of the film. She uses a sextant and a theodolite. The sextant's really for fixing your position and the other is for actually mapping the terrain that you're standing on, and they're about fixing and drawing the landscape. Making a record of here we are now, in this place. The machine that turns and then that clicks is really an old-fashioned seismograph that is monitoring the rumbling and turning of the earth. And insofar as all the people who die in the film get absorbed into the earth, it's part of the history digesting its people, I suppose. And that has to stand in for kind of history in general in the film.

There's a question of people disappearing, of memory disappearing, and how do we hang on to things that we should feel so strongly, but which get weaker and weaker with time? I think that what artists say about the work, one has to take with a big pinch of salt, cause it's always kind of justification after the event. So, my advice to you listening would be to switch off me talking, and rather, watch the film. [2]

[2] //www.moma.org/audio/playlist/1/248

Through his animated films, theatrical productions, and graphic work, William Kentridge addresses the personal and social traumas that are the vestiges of South African apartheid. His ongoing series of short animated films Drawings for Projection (begun in 1989) feature two principal characters, who function as the artist’s alter egos: Soho Eckstein, an avaricious South African mining magnate in a pinstriped suit and tie, and Felix Teitlebaum, shown naked and vulnerable to apartheid’s devastating acts.

In Felix in Exile, the fifth film of the series made between September 1993 and February 1994, Kentridge depicts the barren East Rand landscape as witness to the exploitation of and violence against both natural and human resources. Isolated in a hotel room, Felix peruses the survey charts of Nandi, a young black woman who maps the history of the terrain. Figures and structures are subsumed into the landscape or night sky, allegories for how the land can bear the scars of crimes against humanity.

Kentridge created the sixth film History of the Main Complaint in 1996 during the initial hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at which apartheid’s crimes were first publicly admitted while the perpetrators were granted indemnity in the hope of healing profound social and historical wounds in this post-apartheid society. In the film Soho lies comatose in a hospital ward, suffering from the weight of his past acts as well as those for which he is implicated due to his race and class. MRIs and CAT scans reveal his affliction, as memories of violence committed against black South Africans float across the screen. The relationship between individual and collective guilt is played out when Soho regains consciousness only through acknowledging his own responsibility.

Kentridge’s films reveal traces of their making, just as the narratives invoke memories of an historic time. For each scene, Kentridge films a large charcoal and pastel drawing (measuring approximately 76.2 x 114.3 cm), which he partially erases and redraws, recording each sheet up to 500 times. The cumulative effect of his thought process is retained, leaving residue of the act of production to reflect the tensions between past and present. [3]

[3] //www.guggenheim.org/artwork/9422