William Kentridge Untitled (Patrice Lumumba II), 2015
Indian Ink on found pages Work: 86.5 x 80.5 cm
Untitled (Patrice Lumumba II), 2016 was drawn for William Kentridge’s three-channel film installation, Notes Towards a Model Opera.
The project began with an invitation to show Kentridge’s work in a museum in Beijing.
Kentridge writes,
“What is it in my work that would interest people there? I wanted both to find a link to it and to make a work that would refer to this question. Drawing, film, performance, posters, sculptures - all was possible, everything was open. The project begins, as many do, with distracted reading and looking. I read the books of Lu Xun, a modernist whose sensibility placed him with Japanese writer Aktagawa and European writers in the tradition of the absurd modern like Gogol and Kafka. Books of revolutionary posters. Here the language pulled me in, the exhortations, the instructions, the clamor of incredible and unstoppable enthusiasm.”
Rooted in the extensive research into the intellectual, political, and social history of modern China, from Lu Xun to revolutionary theater, Notes Towards a Model Opera explores dynamics of cultural diffusion and metamorphosis through the formal prism of the eight model operas of the Cultural Revolution.
