William Kentridge: ‘Tragedy Isn’t a Good Way of Dealing with Social Disaster’

William Kentridge’s family arrived in South Africa at the turn of the century, just in time for the South African War (formerly titled the Second Boer War) between the English and the Dutch Afrikaners over the country’s vast gold wealth. The metal transformed what was then known as the Transvaal, the northern region of South Africa that included Pretoria and Johannesburg, the city in which Kentridge was born and continues to live. With gold came an influx of labour: uitlander whites from England who performed skilled roles and Africans who had been displaced or subordinated but were now needed to staff the ever-expanding network of mines. The compromise reached by the Boers and the English was cemented by the exploitation of Black labour. Kentridge’s family, Jews who emigrated from Lithuania, were neither English nor Boer, although they identified with the culture the former had brought with them. This, in part but not whole, offers something close to an explanation of Kentridge’s ability to draw attention to the instability of the world that capital and chance created.

In a lecture he gave at the Slade art school in 2024 (one of six), Kentridge described the coordinates of his childhood as “bifurcated”. His experience was that of being raised in a “Jewishness circling Englishness or Englishness circling Jewishness”—this idyllic world of beautiful, shaded gardens was carved into the harsh climate of apartheid South Africa. The relationship between the two worlds was never resolved, and Kentridge’s art draws its power from its willingness to suggest that it was never resolvable. Is there, he asked in his lecture, something about the shade and streams of the English gardens to which he was accustomed that is inherently beautiful, or are they, much like the culture that sustains them, a foreign import, the product of books and nostalgia? Whatever the answer to this question, Kentridge’s work, primarily a combination of charcoal drawings and stop-motion films made from these drawings, has drawn its force from its ability to show how precarious is the system in which these worries exist.

I first saw a Kentridge artwork, Mine, his 1991 film, four years ago at the Royal Academy in London. In one scene, one watches a man—a clichéd “fat cat”—sitting up against a pillow eating his breakfast and plunging his cafetière. The plunger descends and with it the camera, which follows the coffee pot as it morphs into a mineshaft that digs beneath where the businessman rests. Meanwhile—the chronology of Kentridge’s films is always somewhat disorientating—we watch as the Johannesburg Art Museum collapses into a state of disrepair. The miners continue to dig deeper into the earth for the precious metal whose supply is gradually dwindling. As Kentridge suggests when we speak, there is something of a death drive to the whole thing: a society hollowing out the Earth to support itself.

In the hands of another artist, conflicts between the mode of organisation of a society and the lives of the people within it would call for tragic interpretation. And while there is undoubtably a lot of melancholy in A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction), Kentridge’s new film, on show at Goodman Gallery in London as part of an exhibition of almost the same name, the primary sense one gets is of the absurdity of it all. The film depicts Johannesburg’s industrial expansion into rugged wilderness and the re-emergence of that wilderness in the collapse of its city centre. I corresponded with Kentridge over email shortly after seeing the show to talk about his career and his talent for the absurd.

John-Baptiste Oduor: Mining is a recurring theme in your work. The first lines of Rilke’s poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, which the diorama on display in your current show depicts, describe the lovers as being like bits of silver ore in a mine. It’s hard not to draw an analogy between the poem and your work, since both can involve laborious and long-drawn-out processes. Do you see the connection yourself?

William Kentridge: I hadn’t thought of Orpheus. Eurydice… as relating to mining, but when the drawings were done, I realised the going down underground was not dissimilar to the going down underground in animations like Mine and City Deep (2020), which I’d made about mining in Johannesburg. Obviously, it’s gold rather than silver as a specific reference in Johannesburg, but the underground is both the place of mining, the place of which cannot be seen, and the place of death. Certainly, in the film City Deep, the small hole in the ground which the artisanal miner is using was very obviously also a grave.

“The category of the absurd, which can move between tragedy and comedy, is central”

J-BO: Your films are often funny. The scene in Mine where the boss is lying propped up by a pillow, presumably in bed, smoking a cigar before he plunges his cafetière, which turns into a mineshaft, is wonderfully absurd. But the issues it draws our attention to—exploitation, race—are often handled very earnestly and seriously. Do you think there’s any tension between the politically serious subject matter of much of your work and the playfulness of its form?

WK: When we did the project Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), which was a theatrical play using actors and puppets and animation, about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa [a restorative justice body established in 1995 to investigate human rights violations during the Apartheid era], it was a combination of two projects. One was a dance piece about Alfred Jarry’s Ubu [premiered in Paris in 1896, it served as a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd, Dada and Surrealism], and the other was a documentary piece using evidence from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At a certain point, I ran out of time to do the two productions, and so we smashed the two together, and then the question was, would the comic burlesque of Ubu make one stop seeing the hard documentary evidence, both verbal and visual, of the Ubu play, of the Truth Commission material—or, as was the case, that it in fact clarified. The archival footage from the Truth Commission gave a kind of gravitas to Ubu, and the comic grotesque in fact made us see the archival material in a new light.

So I don’t think there’s a contradiction between the serious and the light, and how the one illuminates the other. I think the category of the absurd is also important. Tragedy isn’t a good way of dealing with social disaster. Comedy may be closer, but the category of the absurd, which can move between the two, is central.

JB-O: You use many different languages in your theatrical work and films, such as Setswana and Kiswahili. Could you talk a bit about the effect you want these languages to have on your audience? Do you imagine them as having some familiarity with these languages, or are you attempting to produce some kind of alienating effect?

WK: I certainly don’t expect the audience to have familiarity with them, but I expect people in Europe, if the plays are seen, to be aware of the fact of European languages being one and not the only languages there are. When we did our play, The Head and the Load (first performed in 2018), sometimes the text was spoken in English or French, and then a translation was made to the audience as if the audience needed to understand it in IsiZulu or in SiSwati.

And sometimes we did it the other way around, as if our main language was the language delivered in SiSwati or IsiZulu, and the translation was made into English for the sake of that audience. So it moved both ways. We did many things: We translated English poems into Hungarian; we translated them into the sounds of dogs barking, into an imaginary morse code. It’s not deliberately to create an alienating effect, but to make an audience aware of the work they do in constructing the meaning of the piece they’re watching.

J-BO: In your Slade lectures, you talked about the history of socialism and the paths not taken artistically, particularly through the marginalisation of figures like El Lissitzky and other Constructivists. Today, there seems to be a lot of nostalgia for either the era of Abstract Expressionism or figurative painting. Are there artists working today whose work you think continues the tradition of socialist-influenced Constructivism that you admire?

WK: Because figurative painting has always been there, it’s a question of how that figurative painting has worked, whether it’s a continuation of the paintings of the realists—sort of an academic way back—or something that floats between Abstract Expressionism and figurative painting, which goes from, I suppose, de Kooning, to other, more recent painters.

There are no particular figures working today that jump out. The early works of Anselm Kiefer, the fantastic woodcuts with the texts and the portraits and the halls, were for me extremely important when I first saw those. As we know, there’s no shortage of artists working in directly and indirect political ways. Some of the work of Alfredo Jaar is both poetic and politically powerful. I suppose for me the interest is always allowing the processes of the studio to temper the material you’re dealing with and see what the result is at the end, rather than to start with a political programme and find a way to illustrate it. I hope these answer your questions. 

William Kentridge, A Nicely Built City (until 7 November 2026) at Goodman Gallery, London

Main image: William Kentridge, Drawing for A Nicely Built City (Bree Street), 2026.