William Kentridge, Opera, and Prague

As we open William Kentridge: The Battle Between YES and NO, we find ourselves reflecting on the cultural links between William Kentridge’s practice and Prague. Kentridge works across a range of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to performance and film, often blurring the boundaries between them. Opera is especially significant in his practice. Challenging the conventions of a historically rooted genre, he continually reinterprets how we experience the medium. As a form that brings together music, theatre, and visual design, opera offers Kentridge an ideal platform through which to revisit history through visual narratives. His past engagements in opera have integrated charcoal drawing, stop-motion animation, film, collage, and performance into a single, time-based environment, transforming the operatic stage into an extension of his studio process. 

So how does Kentridge’s interest in opera connect to Prague, a city with a deep and enduring history in the genre? 

Although Kentridge may not have a sustained biographical attachment to Prague, his operatic practice reveals a compelling set of affinities with Czech opera history—particularly in the areas of scenography, modernist aesthetics, and politically inflected performance. Rather than a direct relationship, what emerges is a shared artistic logic: one that positions opera as a space for visual experimentation and historical reflection. 

Prague has long occupied a significant place in operatic culture. From the premiere of Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to the development of a distinctly Czech operatic voice in the works of Bedřich Smetana and Leoš Janáček, the city fostered a tradition that combined musical innovation with attention to language, psychology, and national identity. In the twentieth century, this legacy expanded into the visual realm through the pioneering scenography of Josef Svoboda, whose experiments with projection and multimedia, particularly in Laterna Magika, redefined the relationship between live performers and the moving image. 

It is here that Kentridge’s work finds its closest resonance. His operatic productions, including The Magic Flute and The Nose, transform the stage into a dynamic visual field in which charcoal animations, text, and archival imagery interact with singers and sets. Kentridge collapses the boundary between stage and screen, but he does so through a deliberately unstable, hand-drawn aesthetic that foregrounds erasure, fragmentation, and process. The result is not seamless illusion but visible in construction, an approach that aligns with Central European modernist tendencies toward self-reflexivity and formal experimentation. 

This connection is further deepened by a shared engagement with the political dimensions of performance. Czech opera and theatre, particularly under conditions of censorship, often relied on allegory and visual metaphor to articulate critique indirectly. Kentridge similarly embeds political concerns—rooted in his experience of apartheid-era South Africa—addressing colonialism, power, and historical memory. His staging does not simply illustrate narrative but interrogates it, exposing the instability and subjective construction of historical knowledge. 

In this sense, Kentridge’s engagement with opera is tandem to much of the experimentation in Prague. By reimagining opera as a site of layered images, unstable histories, and critical reflection, Kentridge participates in a lineage that, while geographically dispersed, remains conceptually and aesthetically intertwined. 

So, after you experience The Battle Between YES and NO, take a moment to visit one of Prague’s historic opera houses and catch a show. The city’s operatic tradition continues to reinvent the classics: Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre looks very different today than it did at its premiere in 1787. Consider the visual language of the production, ask how does it heighten or dramatize the tension between characters? How do contemporary technologies and new forms of knowledge shape the interpretation of a centuries-old work? And how do the opera’s original political meanings translate across time? These are some of the questions we hope you will carry with you after visiting the exhibition. We look forward to welcoming you to the galleries!