William Kentridge Drawing for Sibyl (It is Not Enough), 2022 Charcoal, coloured pencil and digital print on found paper Work (untabbed): 84 x 122 cm
Kentridge made a series of large scale ink drawings in preparation for his opera project, Waiting for the Sibyl, which premiered at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in September 2019. Waiting for the Sibyl was created in response to Alexander Calder's “Work in Progress”, the only operatic work created by Calder and staged at the Opera in Rome in 1968.
Kentridge notes; “I thought that the paper, the fragments of paper with which I have always expressed myself, were the right elements to start the dialogue with Calder”. In Kentridge's mind, the floating papers immediately evoked the image of the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess who wrote her prophecies on oak leaves. The floating papers, like loose leaves, with the prophecies written on them, are blown away by the wind.
As a video, Sibyl incorporates signature elements of Kentridge’s visionary practice to tell the story of the Cumaean prophetess Sibyl. She would write out a questioner’s fate on an oak leaf and place it at the mouth of her cave on a pile of others’ fates. But when you went to retrieve it, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, leaving you uncertain if you were learning another’s fate or your own. The fact that your fate would be known, but you couldn’t know it, is the deep theme of our relationship of dread, of expectation, of foreboding towards the future.
