Kentridge/Kafka

A few weeks into our exhibition William Kentridge: The Battle Between YES and NO, we continue to think on the many ways in which the artist’s practice resonates with Prague’s history. Among these, perhaps the most pertinent point of connection lies in the legacy of Franz Kafka, whose writing has long informed Kentridge’s thinking. 

For his debut exhibition in Prague, Kentridge has explicitly dedicated a work to Kafka. Letter to Felice (2026), created specifically for this exhibition, serves as a conceptual point of departure and as a tribute to the city and its layered historical memory. The work draws from approximately twenty of Kafka’s texts, including novels, diaries, and letters, among them correspondence addressed to his fiancée Felice Bauer, reconfiguring the fragments into a six-act narrative drama. 

While deeply rooted in Franz Kafka’s writings, Letter to Felice is unmistakably Kentridge in both form and sensibility. The work employs the Victorian theatrical device known as Pepper’s Ghost, an early precursor to the hologram, invented by John Henry Pepper in 1862, just one year before Kafka’s birth in Prague. Using a half-silvered mirror, Kentridge projects a puppeteer-like apparition of Kafka, staging a loose narrative that shifts between literature, performance, and illusion. The artist inserts himself into the work, wearing a mask with the author's face, moving through a silent-film landscape filled with iconographical references to Kentridge’s own practice and populated by images of Prague from the 1910s and 1920s. In doing so, he does not simply illustrate Kafka’s world but inhabits it, collapsing temporal distance and allowing past and present to coexist. 

The work functions as a kind of time-bridge, offering insight into the historical conditions and emotional climate that shaped Kafka’s writing in the early twentieth century. Kentridge’s arrangement of seemingly disparate textual fragments illuminates Kafka’s own compositional logic, a mode of thinking structured by interruption, uncertainty, and unresolved tension. 

In Kafka’s time, Prague was marked by political and cultural instability. Until 1918, the city remained under the administration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with power centralized in Vienna. German functioned as the dominant language of administration and education, even as Czech national consciousness was intensifying. As a German-speaking Jew in a predominantly Czech city, Kafka occupied an inherently ambiguous cultural position shaped by displacement and unbelonging. 

A comparable sense of political uncertainty and moral complexity informed Kentridge’s own upbringing in Johannesburg under apartheid. As a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, he participated in political demonstrations while developing his artistic practice. It was during this period that Kentridge began working with charcoal animation, employing drawing, erasure, and a 16mm camera to produce films defined as much by revision as by narrative progression. 

On view in The Battle Between YES and NO, these early films exemplify Kentridge’s hybrid approach, positioned between drawing and cinema, narrative and chance. The repeated acts of drawing, erasing, and reworking leave each image as a fragment, an unstable trace of memory that carries the weight of its political moment. Erased charcoal lines remain visible, and previous layers of the compositions persist, and thus, the process of making is never fully concealed. 

Kafka’s literary works from the years preceding the First World War share a similar resistance to resolution. Many remain unfinished or structurally fragmented, their open-endedness reflecting a mode of thought shaped by anxiety, uncertainty, and an inability to reconcile individual agency with confounding systems of power. In both Kafka’s writing and Kentridge’s visual practice, fragmentation is not a failure to conclude but a deliberate method. Meaning emerges not through closure but through accumulation, revision, and visible traces of doubt. In this sense, the act of making, never fully resolved, becomes central to the legacy of both artists.