WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
O Sentimental Machine, 2015
Video stills
Image provided by Istanbul Biennial
In: “The 14th Istanbul Biennial: SALTWATER” (2015)
Venue: Hotel Splendid Palace
William Kentridge’s O Sentimental Machine is a multichannel audio and video installation that explores the distant experience of participating in social events. Mimicking Trotsky dictating messages to his secretary and sending them off into the world, Kentridge represents Trotsky’s idea of the human as a sentimental but programmable machine.
About:
In his drawings and animations, William Kentridge articulates the concerns of post-Apartheid South Africa with unparalleled nuance and lyricism. In the inventive process by which he created his best-known works, Kentridge draws and erases with charcoal, recording his compositions at each state. He then displays a video projection of the looped images alongside their highly worked and re-worked source drawings. In this way, his process and aesthetic concerns are inextricably linked with the narrative power of his work, as in his “Nine Drawings for Projection” series (1989-2003), which depicts two fictional white South Africans navigating the ambiguities of contemporary South Africa. With his highly personal and often quiet works in seeming tension with the brutality of his content, Kentridge expresses a profound ambivalence about his native country.
