Notes

This charcoal drawing, an artistic interpretation of an East Rand landscape, is from William Kentridge's fifth stop-animation film, Felix in Exile (1994). The nearly nine-minute film was made between September 1993 and February 1994. It focuses on Felix Teitlebaum, the insecure alter ego to Kentridge's other recurring filmic protagonist, Soho Eckstein, a rapacious property developer. The film uses landscape as a metaphor for the fallibility of human memory, particularly in relation to social trauma. Felix is presented isolated in a Parisian hotel room surrounded by images of industrial landscapes and the internecine political strife that wracked the East Rand, in particular Phola Park, in 1993. The film includes a female protagonist, Nandi, who - using a surveying device - views the same landscapes appearing on Felix's wall. She also produces drawings of these landscapes, which are distinguished in the film by their circular aspect (as exampled in this lot).

The film and select process drawings were first exhibited at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in October 1994. A 1998 exhibition at The Drawing Center, New York, saw Kentridge described as "the Anselm Kiefer of South Africa".¹ This lot is significant given its relationship to the film's central subject. In an artist statement accompanying his 1994 Johannesburg exhibition, Kentridge wrote of his interest in landscape: "A central characteristic of the East Rand terrain, is that it is a landscape constructed rather than found... It is a landscape that is explicitly social. It is also temporal - everything in the landscape has the signs of having been put there and having been made - all features have the potential to be unmade."²

Mine dumps and drive-ins, once well-known fixtures of Johannesburg's physical landscape, recur as motifs in Kentridge's films. A subsequent film, Other Faces (2011), features descriptions of Top Star, a drive-in cinema built atop a mine dump that closed in 2006; the mine dump has also now vanished. "I really miss the strangeness of the mine dumps, especially now that they are disappearing from the city. All one gets is another China City or Southgate shopping mall," stated Kentridge in 2013, adding that Top Star had been an important personal landmark.³

1. Roberta Smith. (1998) 'William Kentridge', New York Times, 6 February 1998, p.E36.
2. William Kentridge. (1998) 'Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory', in William Kentridge, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Brussels: Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, pp.95-96.
3. Interview with artist by Sean O'Toole, 19 April 2013, Johannesburg.

Literature

cf. Dan Cameron (1999) William Kentridge, London: Phaidon Press. A similar example is illustrated in colour on page 124.

cf. Shinji Kohmoto (2009) William Kentridge: What We See & What We Know; Thinking About history While Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move, Kyoto: The National Museum of Art. A similar example is illustrated in colour on page 63.

cf. Lilian Tone (ed) (2013) William Kentridge: Fortuna, London: Thames & Hudson. A similar example is illustrated in colour on page 175.