Portreit WK

“I hadn’t really followed William Kentridge’s work in any systematic way until I found out that he would be having an exhibition in Prague, at Kunsthalle. Long before that, I had seen several of Kentridge’s animated films, but it all really clicked for me only at Kunsthalle. I came to understand much more deeply the stigma of South African apartheid, which is present in many of Kentridge’s films, yet remains somewhat distant to a European. What is not distant at all, however, is the theme of humiliation, oppression, degradation, the value of a human being. It doesn’t matter whether the person is white or Black, Jewish or Muslim, rich or poor. There is only one human dignity; life is a gift, and no one has the right to take it from another or to violate it. That is all there…At Kunsthalle I had the honour of personally meeting a strong personality in a white shirt with a black hat on a white mane of hair. An artist whose subject is the probing of the deepest crevices of humanity, whether it concerns the genealogy of trees or of human beings. A humanism paraphrased in restless black drawing on white paper, animated at 25 frames per second or simply by flipping through the pages of a sketchbook, presented on cycle frames or multiplied through puppet theatre.”

Jaroslav Brabec