William Kentridge presents his new installation in Palermo

Palermo will be the city where the great South African artist William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955) will present his new sound installation with projection: titled You Whom I Could Not Save , it gives the title to the South African artist’s solo exhibition and will be on view from October 8, 2023 to January 12, 2024 at Palazzo Branciforte. The work is offered together with 16 previously unpublished drawings made on a 19th-century Sicilian account book, the video work Sibyl (2020), bronze and painted bronze sculptures, and a sequence of tapestries.

The project, created specifically for Palermo and to be inaugurated during the Days of the Contemporary, is curated by art historians Giulia Ingarao and Alessandra Buccheri, conceived by Antonio Leone, artistic director of ruber.contemporanea, and supported by Fondazione Sicilia, with coordination by Sicily Art and Culture.

You Whom I Could Not Save will be housed in the heart of the Piranesian evocative architecture of Palazzo Branciforte’s Monte dei Pegni di Santa Rosalia, which will be flanked by the video work Sibyl, which Kentridge will make in 2020. The space’s labyrinthine path will be punctuated by the presence of eight large megaphones that will broadcast music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and directed by Tlale Makhene: a sonic interweaving of texts belonging to the Nguni language group, themselves made up of IsiZulu, IsiSwati, IsiXhosa and XiTsonga. At the same time, bronze and painted bronze sculptures and a sequence of tapestries will be displayed among the wooden shelving of the Mount, as in ephemeral theaters.

The solo show will also feature 16 previously unpublished drawings that the artist made using as support the pages of an ancient Sicilian account book dating back to 1828. The sheets of the ledger, organized in tables punctuated by the entries “Having” and “Giving,” evoke a link with the memory of the place hosting the exhibition, since the early 19th century intended to accumulate non-precious goods sold for loan on pledge of linen and copper or bronze objects. Between the palimpsest pages, a constant feature of Kentridge’s artistic production, dance figures traced in charcoal that, as if in procession, refer to the ephemerality of existence. Hybrid silhouettes of Surrealist memory and collages of geometric shapes propped up by recurring faces in the artist’s work are the protagonists of the pacing in a world where, as the Majakovsky’s phrase that appears in You Whom I Could Not Save goes, “misfortune flows like from a stream.” Thequestion about the future, about the need for hope remains constant, and the answer seems to find meaning in the magic of images and sounds that the artist composes with an extraordinary construction of figures and words that invite immersion in a heavenly depth that invests and embraces despite the fact that it cannot save everyone.

For more information you can visit ruber.contemporary.

Image: William Kentridge, Cash Book Drawing XII (2023; watercolor, colored pencil, digital print and collage on found paper, 52 × 76.8 cm). Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery Naples | Milan.

William Kentridge presents his new installation in Palermo

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