At Documenta 13, from June to September 2012, South African artist William Kentridge will present his installation-performance piece, The Refusal of Time. The international cultural event Documenta takes place every five years, exhibiting major contemporary artists around a theme highlighting current art world issues. The piece will also be featured at the Festival d’Avignon, the Festival Roma Europa, and various European cultural venues. The Refusal of Time, the fruit of a collaboration with composer Philip Miller and a series of exchanges with science historian Peter Galison, combines music, readings, dance, song, video, drawing, and performance to express on stage Kentridge’s interrogations of the concept of time.

 

Kentridge, known for thirty years for his charcoal drawings, animated films, and installations denouncing apartheid and colonialism, is now working on the border between art and science. Examining the perception and understanding of time, the artist reconsiders the creative process. Time—narrative, fragmented, slowed down or speeded up; distortion of space-time; and simultaneity are among the concepts revisited on stage. Kentridge explores through various media—dance, music, film, narration, metronomic machines—a certain apprehension of the world. A true work in progress, The Refusal of Time continues and deepens the polymorphic, dreamlike, political, and humanist body of work developed by Kentridge from his very earliest days. In the spirit of this constantly evolving theatrical performance, the book will be a work of art reflecting a work of art: it will include highlights of the show, drawings specially created by the artist for the book, many sketches and notebooks, and all the texts read during the performance, as well as interviews with Peter Galison and pictures from the workshop.

 

A scrapbook of The Refusal of Time, this artist’s book may be experienced as a work in progress, an immersion in William Kentridge’s creative process.

 

William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time

230 x 310 mm

400 pages

Hardcover

Price: 68 € TTC

ISBN : 978-2-36511-007-5

Installation-performance piece, The Refusal of Time presented at Documenta 13 of Kassel, from june to september 2012.