I look in the mirror, I know what I need (2024) Lithograph on Korean paper
I look in the mirror, I know what I need (2024) Lithograph on Korean paper
Image: Supplied

Picture the scenario. It’s 1917. Or perhaps 1933. Maybe it’s 1953. We’re in Vichy, France. Or a village in White Russia. Maybe we’re in Soviet territory. You are a hapless cog in a system forcibly removing you from what you considered home. In To Cross One More Sea, William Kentridge’s current exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, you will experience the ogre and orgy of forced immigrant identity. It’s part archival Kentridge, part art history lesson, part colonial nightmare.

Hostile coffee pots and birds that weep and flail and sing from separate compartments of a box conflate with a heads-and-tales game of Exquisite Corpses and giant cardboard masks. Only this isn’t a children’s game. It’s a tale that hangs on the notion of forced immigration to an unknown future. In the 1920s, the Dada artists stood on the forefront of European history and played this game too.

As you enter the gallery space, you’re confronted with a mass of portraits on an olive background. Some you may recognise. Diego Rivera is there. As is Frantz Fanon. Also, Josephine Bonaparte. Others are veiled in symbolism and surrealism: someone has a pineapple for a face. Another, a telephone. But this space is but the vestibule.

It’s a disconcerting organisation of gallery space which from the outset is not readable and pulls your comfort zones from beneath you. As you enter the exhibit properly, you find yourself in the presence of the three-channel film titled eponymously. In its 19 minutes, it offers a discombobulating understanding of space and values in which colonialist catchphrases are tossed at you like bullets, leaving you unsure which to imbibe, which to remember, which to shield yourself from.

A slice of Kentridge’s chamber opera, The Great Yes, The Great No, which premiered at the campus of Luma in Arles last year, is rich with caveats that draw from Kentridge’s oeuvre dating as far back as the 1990s. It includes a beautiful silhouetted cameo danced by the late Dada Masilo, en pointe and armed with guns. Dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu is central to another cameo working with his own recorded image, in a skirt, in aggressive combat.

It’s a work of whirligigs, processions of domestic equipment, and an understanding of the sinister timeless bloke in a tuxedo, cigar between his fingers. Sometimes, his head is a coffee pot, sometimes that of a white overweight despot espousing values that make you quiver in your socks. Sometimes, his head is feathered and his mouth, a beak. Is it a self-portrait? It’s a joyous and rich stream of development from Kentridge’s significant series of nine films collectively entitled Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot, an irreverent essay on the act of making and the art of trusting the material.

'What Have They Done With All The Air?' film still from 'To Cross One More Sea' featuring SA dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu.
'What Have They Done With All The Air?' film still from 'To Cross One More Sea' featuring SA dancer Nhlanhla Mahlangu.
Image: Supplied

The soundtrack of To Cross One More Sea includes a declamatory voice evoking Hitler in his heyday, and the sweet sounds of the kind of jazz produced by people from all over the world in exile, as a means of reaching back to the homes that they would never see again.

The space has wooden strips on the floor, black interior walls and a sense of the drunken teetering of a ship in deep waters. It can make you forget you are in an art gallery. Don’t let it.

To one side of the screening is a beautiful display of Kentridge’s bronze glyphs, forming a Kentridgean alphabet of sorts. The entrance to the gallery offers a body of puppets made by Kentridge in collaboration with German-based puppeteer and costumier Greta Goiris, created from tools for the yard and the kitchen that you might recognise if you were alive in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. They’re quirky but teeter on the edge of sinister. Think of the collages of Dadaist Hannah Höch or the playful assemblages of Joan Miro, taking the ordinary and reworking it with an eye on the powers in charge of the ideologies defining our world.

'As I Leave Europe' film still from 'To Cross One More Sea' featuring giant cardboard masks
'As I Leave Europe' film still from 'To Cross One More Sea' featuring giant cardboard masks
Image: Supplied

On the other side of the screening is the print room, a body of works on paper drawing from the artist’s rich and prolific career, reflecting on the ideas that he turned into emblems, the pencilled-in notions from his stop-frame animations of the eighties that have become globally acknowledged.

To Cross One More Sea is a celebration of Kentridge’s collaborative genius. You see the hands of many here: Janus Fouché has edited it; the music is composed by Mahlangu and Tlale Makhene, who is also its percussionist. The music is created specifically for the work, and everything, down to the chairs you will sit on to watch the film and the style of the megaphones that spew out the sound, are handled with analogue in the extreme.

This slice of other projects — ones that may not have been seen by Johannesburg art audiences, is too rich to imbibe casually. Encrusted with tonnes of quotes from myriads of sources, the show is a bombardment. It’s terrifying. Like the unfocused horror of new immigrants in a land they would not have chosen.

To Cross One More Sea is on show at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg until March 20.

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