Stir world : William Kentridge presents a site-specific exhibition that is decidedly universal (by by Hili Perlson)
With his latest show To Whom I Could Not Save, the South African artist highlights histories of fights and misfortunes as the human experience that connects us all.
William Kentridge's recent exhibition in Palermo, Sicily, is intricately linked to its location—and has been years in the making. The South African artist first visited the exhibition‘s venue, the Museum and Library of Palazzo Branciforte, back in 2017. There, one experiences not only the historical collection of Fondazione Sicilia displayed within the modernised palace—which opened to the public following a 2012 refurbishment by Italian architect Gae Aulenti—but also the almost palpable traces of the Renaissance palace’s tangled history—a history that includes, from example, its usage from the 1800s until the 1980s as a pawn shop for Palermo’s indigent majority.
Installation view of You Whom I Could not SaveImage: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Palazzo Branciforte
In this city on Europe’s southern edges, closer to North Africa than it is to Rome, Kentridge offers an anguished show that considers disparate strings of fates, plights, and misfortunes, and that yet somehow—and this has always been the artist’s unique genius—is also uplifting. In the histories of suffering, Kentridge highlights our connected human experience. The exhibition’s linchpin is the new sound and video installation You Whom I Could Not Save, which lends its title to the show; the exhibition also comprises 16 previously unpublished drawings, the video work Sibyl (2020), several painted bronze sculptures, and a series of five large tapestries featuring human silhouettes set against archival maps of Europe. William Kentridge’s tapestry titled Cicero (2014), depicting the Roman stateman’s bust set against an 1894 map of Italy, has been acquired by the Fondazione Sicilia, which manages this and other cultural institutions in Sicily, for the museum’s permanent collection.
Drawing of Sibyl, 2020, Book stillImage: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Palazzo Branciforte
This is perhaps the most high-profile exhibition at Palazzo Branciforte since Christian Boltanski’s Monte di pietà back in 2000; Boltanski was the first artist to install artworks in the unique but long-forgotten wooden structure under the palace’s roof that housed a charity for the destitute. Now, Kentridge presents an arresting art exhibition across all levels and sections of Palazzo Branciforte. The tapestries are displayed facing the archaeological artefacts on the ground floor’s main hall; some drawings are amid the numismatic and philatelic collections in the Palazzo’s first-floor galleries, while others are hung between the 18th and 19th century paintings and letters romanticising European aristocrats’ Grand Tour (“Without Sicily, Italy creates no image in the soul: here is the key to everything” German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in the Italian Journey in 1816.) Meanwhile, the bronze sculptures and video and sound installation are nestled inside the labyrinthine chambers of the wooden attic, once storing pawned personal effects.
Sister Box, 2016, Bronze, oil paint, Edition 4 of 9Image: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Palazzo Branciforte
Here, in the pawn shop's Piranesian complex, resembling the belly of a ship, the exhibition culminates with the multi-channel installation You Whom I Could Not Save. “The starting point of the Palermo exhibition was the idea of a sound work,” Kentridge explains in a press statement. “And in the other rooms, there’ll be echoes and fragments pulling you into the final room." The piece resonates from large megaphones punctuating the space, leading viewers’ path towards the projection screen where the voices conjoin: “Now the house of justice has collapsed/ There has been wrong done/ I ask for right.” It is a sonic weaving of music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and directed by Tlale Makhene, with a seven-voice chorus singing in different Nguni languages indigenous to southern Africa. The song is taken from the opening chorus of the opera “The Great Yes, the Great No,” co-produced by Kentridge, THE OFFICE performing arts + film, and The Centre for the Less Good Idea, which will premiere in July 2024 at LUMA, Arles.
You Whom I COuld not Save, 2023, Video Still of Kentridge’s new sound installation with projectionImage: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Palazzo Branciforte
The opera tells the story of a journey from Marseille to Martinique in the West Indies in 1941 of a group of refugees fleeing Vichy France. On that ship were, among others, the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist Wifredo Lam, the communist novelist Victor Serge, and the author Anna Seghers. “There were many people on that boat,” says Kentridge, “but for me it is truly a journey across the River Styx. So the captain is also Charon, who ferries the dead and decides who will sink and who will swim, making them cross.” Kentridge is referring to the figure in Greek mythology whose duty was to ferry across the underworld the souls of the deceased who received a proper burial. For him, the architecture and echoes of the space seemed to fit the theme of the journey across the Atlantic on a promise of a better future, “because a lot of the clothes that ended up in the pawnbrokers were there so that people could make the journey from Sicily to the United States.”
Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio, Palermo Cash Book Drawing XII, 2023 Watercolour, Coloured pencil, Digital print and Collage on found paperImage: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Palazzo Branciforte
The artists and thinkers who ventured that long and risky journey in 1941 appear in the collaged watercolours which the artist created on archival Palermo cash book sheets. (According to a museum docent, Kentridge asked for ledger sheets when he found out about the Palazzo’s previous function). These are engrossing, charming homages to the luminaries featured: they appear as if caught mid-dance, on stages peppered with associative props, such as a prancing coffee maker—an Italian design classic which also alludes to a dark history of trade and slavery.
"Disaster has fallen on everyone, everywhere,” the chorus sings. “Why is this age worse than others? / Misfortune flows as from a water main.” The show opened on October 7, just hours following the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust in a Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel which in turn sparked a war with catastrophic destruction and still-rising death tolls in Gaza. Hate and divisive language have entered nearly every aspect of life. In this extremely troubled time, To Whom I Could Not Save reads, tragically, like a daily newspaper headline.
William Kentridge's 'You Whom I Could Not Save' is on view until January 12, 2024, at Palazzo Branciforte, Palermo.
Article published on https://www.stirworld.com