William Kentridge about ‘A Shadow of a Shadow’ at the Sharjah Art Foundation

Sharjah Art Foundation presents A Shadow of a Shadow, a comprehensive survey of 17 performances by renowned artist William Kentridge, marking his first major solo exhibition in the Middle East. Spanning from the late 1980s to the present, this exhibition showcases Kentridge’s diverse work, including interpretations of King Ubu—the outrageous protagonist from Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi—to his adaptation of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (1791), and The Head and the Load (2018), which reflects on Africa and Africans during World War I. The exhibition features an array of objects and artworks, such as drawings, stage backdrops, animations, puppets, props, costumes, and installations, all contributing to the development and presentation of Kentridge’s performance projects. Running from 28 September to 8 December 2024, the exhibition is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Tarek Abou El Fetouh, May Alqaydi, and Khalid Mohammed.

The title of the exhibition draws inspiration from a play by 13th-century puppeteer Muhammad Ibn Daniyal, whose shadow plays critiqued authority and exposed societal corruption—motifs later echoed in Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Kentridge’s adaptations. A Shadow of a Shadow highlights Kentridge’s affinity for shadow plays and puppet theatre, while celebrating his use of absurdist satire and theatricality to critique authoritarianism and power structures. The selected works reflect the artist’s ongoing examination of social constructs and the colonial legacy.

As a master draughtsman, filmmaker, sculptor, and prolific theatre-maker, Kentridge has collaborated with both local theatre groups and world-renowned opera houses for over four decades. His practice blends theatrical, musical, and visual elements to explore the human condition, often reflecting the socio-political realities of South Africa.

Interview with William Kentridge

How does the historical context of shadow plays influence your work, A Shadow of a Shadow?

The exhibition is always a mixture of three things: the work that the artist has done historically; the part of that work that a curator is interested in highlighting; and the physical space in which an exhibition takes place. There’s always a negotiation between these three components. It was decided very early on between the curator and myself that we would focus on the theatrical and performance pieces, this being an exhibition on different elements of my work that had not been done before. Shadows have always been an important part of the performances, either as puppet figures in early productions such as Woyzeck, or as central components such as in More Sweetly Play the Dance.

The history of shadows is a history of different theatrical traditions, whether it’s in the Middle East, Egypt, Indonesia, or Germany. For me, it always goes back to the questions of the shadows in Plato’s allegory of the cave, which in some ways is the founding document or the founding myth of all European ideas of the Enlightenment, and of the violence inherent in the Enlightenment.

How do they come together?

The nature of the space is a series of small rooms which one reaches via corridors that go around a central courtyard, so there is a journey built into the very space. It’s not like some exhibitions which entail one huge aircraft hangar in which one builds small rooms. This one has a natural division into different spaces. By nature, the rooms are relatively modest, so they fit theatrical models and the components’ small-scale projections. There are about 22 or 23 different rooms, so it’s a way of breaking up [the space] into different performances, some in the corridors and many in the different rooms. And so, I think they tell a story of the importance of performance as a way of making sense of the world, and performance as a kind of drawing; not simply as actors on a stage performing a set script, but the projections, the actors, and the music coming together to [create] a journey. Insofar as there’s a narrative, I suppose it’s largely one that has to do with historical questions ranging from colonial times, from the enlightenment in The Magic Flute, to the First World War, to the questions around the Soviet Union and then migrants and refugees.

What inspired your choice of works from King Ubu to ‘The Head and the Load’ for this exhibition?

We simply went back and [looked at] the different theatrical projects or performance projects that I have done, mostly theatrical opera but some song cycles, and we made a selection from those. It’s a mixture of which things made sense next to each other, and which things fitted into the space.

Ubu, the absurdist drama of Ubu, is the self-pitying, violent tyrant who seems such an important figure in the world today. Even though it’s a story and a play written by a schoolboy, Alfred Jarry, in France in the 1890s, it still seemed a very central image to work with. Ubu exists as a full recording of the performance, Ubu and the Truth Commission, which we made in South Africa in 1996, just after our first democratic election. It’s a piece that looks back at the violent history of apartheid, but it also exists in the exhibition in the form of a self-standing video, drawings, and wall drawings on both floors, so in a way, Ubu leads us through the exhibition.

The Head and the Load is one of the most recent works, which comprises a huge theatre. The performance has its showing in the exhibition KABOOM!, which was really the production’s model with the projections on it.

With both of these Arab historical pieces, The Head and the Load about the First World War, and Ubu being ahistorical piece in that it was written a century ago, they are very much connected to current questions of the state of the world: in the echoes of colonialism that hang over us, not only in Africa but in how they take shape in the Middle East conflict and other parts of the world.

How do you hope viewers will connect to the exhibition?

It’s always difficult for me to think on behalf of viewers to know what they will connect to. At the opening of the exhibition, there were people from Morocco and Tunisia who felt a strong connection to those parts of the work that dealt very much with colonialism. But there’s always a mixture between what the work in the exhibition throws towards you as a viewer, and what you as a viewer throw onto the image in terms of associations that it provokes in you.

Can you share any specific challenges or surprises?

My main surprise was how well the exhibition worked in the spaces of the house where it takes place. I thought the corridors would be a problem; now, I understand that they are a great blessing. I’ll always look for corridors around the courtyard in exhibitions I do in the future. I thought the rooms would feel too small, but in fact, they make for intimacy and intensity of viewing, which again I’ll hunt for in other exhibitions. I learned a lot from the exhibitions, not that I anticipated them in advance.

From the late 1980s to now, how has your approach to creating performances changed?

I think all of them from the beginning started with quite an open-ended view. The activity of making the performances – which is a slow process because there’s a lot of drawing, it’s many months at the shortest and sometimes a couple of years – that process would be discovering what the piece was. Even in the operas which start with a given music and a libretto, the hard work is the language with which to consider the themes, whether it’s drawing in charcoal or ink or [making a] collage. There are many months of that work with the performers before the rehearsals, and that hasn’t fundamentally changed.

I’ve gotten used to the idea that in fact, I’m always going to be making it up as we go along, rather than knowing what we will do in advance. This is both the difficulty – what keeps one awake at four in the morning thinking about how to solve these problems – and also a greater belief I now have that this way of working in the studio is a way of understanding how we operate in the world, rather than looking at the ambiguities, the contradictions and the uncertainties, which are appropriate outside the studio.

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About William Kentridge

William Kentridge is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans drawing, film, performance, music, and theatre. His art engages with politics, science, literature, and history while embracing ambiguity and contradiction. In 2016, he founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. Kentridge’s work has been exhibited at major institutions such as MoMA, New York; Musée du Louvre, Paris; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. He has participated in documenta and the Venice Biennale. His awards include the Olivier Award (2023) and the Praemium Imperiale (2019). His works are held in prominent collections worldwide.

Location: Sharjah Art Foundation

Dates: 28 September – 8 December 2024