William Kentridge is as different in his art as in his films.

William Kentridge is a South African artist and animator and an influential figure in the country’s art scene. His exhibition, till recently on display at the Seagull Art & Media Resource Centre, gave a sampling of his art and cinema much of which has been viewed widely across the globe but not in India. This exhibition is, however, a sampling of his vast body of work and in detail provides a window to one of his series, the unmistakably Kentridge Nose, and three of his films. In his paintings on display, Kentridge is obsessed with the nose, or the lack of it. Kentridge paints a black-hooded, egg-headed figure with no torso and thin legs who appear, phantasmagoria-like and disrupt the nose of the other, dominant figure in the sketch. Every drawing has that feeling of a being frozen in a moment that has been preceded by a violent act of dismemberment of the Nose. In a body of work like that of Kentridge, interpretation is fraught with risks but in this case, hooded, black, disjointed figures, his motif in his Nose sketches, present a world of possibilities because black, hooded violence has deeper, sinister and even purely physical symbolism in South African art that is unlike much of the West. 

Like JM Coetzee, he has the unenviable history of having to grapple with decades of ethnic oppression that was historically mutated with monumental corrective measures but which are often than not, counterproductive. Perhaps this is reflected in his films much more, where his brilliant erasure technique brings to life stylistically moving and provocative documentation of life and art. He makes the central figures in his films alive by constantly pulling, folding, erasing, improvising and duplicating them in a bare landscape, which also mutates similarly. The style is distinct, distilled from his work as an artist and theatre designer and though true to the fundamental ethos of animation, is as different from their popular cultural forms as possible. 

Kentridge’s sketches and his films, which often seem like doodles and vice versa, carries the signature of a talented artiste in progress, as a participant and as an observer of what he sees. Or doesn’t.