Goodman Gallery presents What Have They Done with All the Air?, an exhibition of new drawings and sculptures by William Kentridge. Works featured form part of a new theatre production in the making, titled The Great Yes, the Great No, in which the artist uses the setting of a boat as a prompt for unpacking power, colonialism and migration.

The story behind The Great Yes, the Great No begins in June 1941, when a converted cargo ship, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, sailed from Marseille to Martinique. Among the passengers escaping Vichy France were the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the communist novelist Victor Serge, and the author Anna Seghers. The captain of the boat is Charon, the ferryman of the dead, who calls other characters onto the deck – Aimé Césaire, The Nardal sisters, who together with the Césaires and Senghor had founded the anti-colonial Négritude movement in Paris, in the 1920s and 1930s. Frantz Fanon joins the group along with Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The boat journey is the 1941 crossing of the Atlantic, but also references earlier crossings from Africa to the Caribbean, as well as contemporary forced sea crossings.

The Great Yes, The Great No unfolds some of the techniques put into play in Oh To Believe in Another World (2022), a film that used green screens against which performers were filmed so that they could later be extracted from the background. In both Oh To Believe in Another World and The Great Yes, The Great No, Kentridge also draws on the green paper itself, and the colour assumes prominent place in the final work, rather than disappearing as a green screen usually would.

The exhibition features a series of new drawings that are used as backdrops in the performance. There are portraits of the characters in The Great Yes, The Great No, as well as imagined scenes from the boat's arrival in Martinique – an idea of the exotic Caribbean, which is in fact the domestic garden of Kentridge's Johannesburg studio. Densely packed vegetation is punctuated by fragments of text – phrases such as 'the house of justice has collapsed' or 'we want no prophets in this garden'. The phrases come from the theatre production and prompt the idea of a drawing being what you read as a text, or a text that, in this case, turns into a garden. In Kentridge's words 'How much do you glean from what you read, and how much of what you read is changed by what you're seeing around it?'

The exhibition will debut a set of new hand-painted, aluminium and steel sculptures in vivid colour. The origin of these sculptures are a series of small paper sculptures, made from the torn and coloured pages of a 19th century accounting journal from the Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio in Palermo. Though not directly related to The Great Yes, The Great No, this Paper Procession speaks to the process of costume-making. During periods of intensive workshops in the making of a theatre production, Kentridge and his collaborators work with paper as a way to think about costumes, and their colours. Paper collages become proto-costumes, which sometimes become self-standing figures – as with the For Degas puppets which are also shown.

The Paper Procession figures, like many sculptures in Kentridge's practice, start as torn paper. The glyph bronzes begin as torn pieces of black paper which find a silhouette. As Kentridge says 'it's finding the silhouette, rather than knowing the silhouette...it's about recognizing an image as it emerges, rather than knowing it in advance...the randomness of a torn sheet of paper, the imprecision of it, is important.' The offcuts of black paper turned into the Bull, a new bronze sculpture included in the exhibition.

Bringing together these sculptures and drawings, the centrepiece for the show becomes the common point of conception for the work: the act of prototyping with raw materials. This can be seen in the experimental trials of costume design, puppets and props imagined through torn paper, and the cardboard models which can become part of the projection of the performance. Through this process, the building blocks of each new and ongoing project are woven from a common thread.

Press release courtesy Goodman Gallery.