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Soft Dictionary

William Kentridge
Soft Dictionary, 2016
Single Channel HD Video

William Kentridge’s new single channel film, Soft Dictionary, is from his series of “flip book films”, which are characterised by drawings in ink and charcoal and text, which dance across the pages of found books. Brought to life once opened by the artist’s hand, the pages of these books turn by themselves, presenting fragmented anti-narratives of text and images. Soft Dictionary is a visual record of a series of thoughts emerging and disappearing – lists of drawings made and never made, historical figures, personal references. The film tries to document fragments of the non-sequiturs lodged in our heads, all of which are props in our efforts to understand the world: the very randomness of thoughts providing some of the richness of understanding. In its attempt to follow multiple streams of consciousness, it travels the boundary between incoherence, in the arbitrariness of images and references; and our constant need to make connections between images and references.