Houston Chronicle : MFAH's William Kentridge exhibition puts a light on colonization in South Africa (by Andrew Dansby)

William Kentridge, Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege, 1988, silkscreen on velin d’arches cream and brown paper, printed by Malcolm Christian, Caversham Press, Lidgetton, South Africa, edition of 13, courtesy of the artist. From the exhibition “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows” showing at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2023.copyright William Kentridge

Coursing through “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston feels a little like scuba diving along a reef. “In Praise of Shadows” teems with life, functioning less as an exhibition than an environment, comprising woodcuts, video, animation, sculpture, charcoal, paint, tapestry, ledgers, shadow boxes, music, propaganda-style posters and a few devices that exude a Rube Goldberg-esque panache.

I don’t recall an exhibition that pulls a viewer through with such visceral, hurried energy: While standing in one gallery, sights and sounds from adjacent galleries beckon. Resist the temptation to rush. Various themes and visual flourishes connect some of the works throughout the exhibition, but each one benefits from slow immersion.

Much of Kentridge’s work in the exhibition has some connection to charcoal, which Alison de Lima Greene, curator of modern and contemporary art at the MFAH, says is a material he favors because “there’s always a trace of what happened before.”

The evidence is best illustrated with his 2011 film “Other Faces,” which is placed next to a series of the charcoal drawings that brought the animated work to life. A shouting head in one charcoal has halo-like rings behind it from earlier drafts used by Kentridge to animate the drawing.

“In Praise of Shadows” represents about three decades of work by Kentridge. It originated at the Broad in Los Angeles, the first large-scale survey of his work in two decades. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has made it his base of operations since. De Lima Greene suggests “In Praise of Shadows” will function as a midcareer retrospective, a nod to Kentridge’s sustained productivity at age 68.

Film and photos of Kentridge in his studio show that his works in various media can be connected. But the space is fairly tidy. He comes across as possessing a restless but organized mind, and also a mind that sees possibilities in unusual places. 

“Singer Trio” from 2019 finds three sewing machines outfitted with aluminum cones and a series of electronic doodads that project three voices making music, a punny play on the brand of sewing machine.

De Lima Greene calls “7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Journey to the Moon, Day for Night,” from 2003, “the most delightful moment in the show.”

Video surrounds the visitor, showing both Kentridge’s process and his homage to Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon,” a foundational short film in the history of cinema. Kentridge’s rocket ship is a percolator. And he proved particularly clever in creating his shooting stars, filming extreme close-ups of sugar ants.

“Kentridge is hard-wired to be a collaborator,” de Lima Greene says. She references his roots as a printmaker. Sure enough, this world of his creation has tendrils that reach outside his studio: he created sets for opera, theater, puppet theater. A model theater for Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” is a world unto itself, a three-dimensional magic show of sorts, with a pair of projections creating a complicated and mesmerizing visual.

For all its playfulness, “In Praise of Shadows” also possesses a heaviness. 

His affinity for charcoal serves as a metaphor of sorts for vagaries. De Lima Greene cites his interest in “the uncertainties of history, as well as the certainties.”

The sense of smudged or fading marks acknowledges the unreliability of memory, witting and unwitting.

Kentridge’s love for South Africa finds counterweight in outrage and melancholy in the nation’s tumultuous history. Much of the work notes cultural tears caused by the barbs of colonialism: oppression, conflict, labor. 

Sometimes the presentation possesses a lighter touch, as with “Ubu Tells the Truth,” a series of etchings from 1997 in which a human tussles inside an almost comically rounded figure, which feels like a connection to Philip Guston’s mockery of Klansmen from decades earlier.

Elsewhere, the playfulness dissipates. In charcoal drawings, tapestries and other works, Kentridge presents images of forced labor in silhouette, with beautiful but scarred landscapes in the background.

The stark black and white of many of the works are sporadically slashed with slivers of red, as though annotated by an editor.

The exhibition twists toward a devastating conclusion with “Kaboom!,” a video project Kentridge created in 2017 and 2018. The work is full of questions — “Where are our former lives?” “Where are our former hopes?” — mixing lush natural imagery with probing words and images. The placement of three shapes in the foreground creates a devastating effect on the projections, producing a fragmented version of landscapes and documents, showing land and lives interrupted.

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