| "Mine is an art (and politics) in
which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism is kept at
bay." (source) "I have spent all my life in Johannesburg. School, university, my studio, are all within a three-kilometer radius of where I was born. So even when my pictures are set in Paris or New York, in the end they are about Johannesburg--that is to say, a rather bewildered provincial city. The pictures are not all little morals or illustrations of apartheid life. But they are all provoked by the question of how it is that one is able to construct a more or less coherent life in a situation so full of contradiction and disruption." (From South Africa p. 83)  Signs
of Resistance and Ironies on Ad Billboards
William Kentridge, born in Johannesburg in 1955, works on film, animation and painting. (image source: Culture in Another South Africa p 95.) |
