South African artist William Kentridge on his Beijing retrospective
The artist tells Payal Uttam his work has always married the political and the personal
South African artist William Kentridge was six when he stumbled across a box in his father's study in Johannesburg. What he discovered was to have a big impact on his life.
"I was ... expecting it to be a box of chocolates, but inside were photographs of people who had been shot dead," he recalls.
The images were from a police massacre in Sharpeville in 1960. His father was an anti-apartheid lawyer defending the victims' families.
"I was shocked. It was like coming across pornography, both fascinating and impossible to look at," says Kentridge, now 60. "That was a brutal understanding that the world is a dangerous, difficult place."
The incident would remain in his mind, and decades later, gut-wrenching images of corpses like those he saw as a child would resurface in his raw charcoal drawings.
A vast collection of his works is now on show at Beijing's Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA). The retrospective features an array of media including artworks in India ink, charcoal, linocut, and silk-screen printing on paper, as well as a number of multichannel video pieces and one large-scale installation in the form of an operatic model complete with mechanical puppet actors.
A draughtsman, filmmaker and sculptor, Kentridge made his mark on the international art scene with his roughly hewn animations that brought his country's horrifying history to life.
