The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser) presents renowned and internationally acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge in conversation with Prof. Sarah Nuttall, Director of Wiser.
“I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay,” says Kentridge in a recent interview.
Kentridge’s output fluently shifts across such media as drawing, film, collage prints, sculpture, and stage sets and theatre. If his work resonates the South African experience and the city he lives in, Johannesburg, it also draws on a variety of European sources (literature, opera, early cinema).
His most recent work (The Nose, Vertical Thinking, The Refusal of Time) is characterised by profound conceptual changes and novel ways of connecting the visual arts, cinema, the performing arts and music. In this conversation with cultural critic Nuttall, he will explore the politics of form and the forms of the political in his latest creations.
The conversation takes place on Thursday, February 21, 2013 at 4:30pm for 5pm in the Wiser Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University.
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