Poetic figures, phrases, abstractions and landscapes surface across printed pages, dissolving, jumping and morphing as they turn. Through charcoal, ink and watercolour, South African artist William Kentridge transforms the pages of Cassell’s Cyclopædia of Mechanics (1914) and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1936) into flip-book animation.
In apartheid South Africa, systems of knowledge were shaped by colonial power and racial hierarchy. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias carried that authority, presenting language as neutral while reinforcing exclusion. By drawing over them, Kentridge changes what the words seem to mean. He shows that language isn’t fixed. It shifts over time and carries ideas from the past.
Kentridge chose a piano and vocal score by Neo Muyanga featuring a Sesotho funeral hymn written in response to the 2012 Marikana massacre, when police killed 34 striking mine workers. The music brings grief, protest and labour struggle into the film, connecting these older printed texts to more recent histories of violence and inequality in South Africa.
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xos-125523