The Battle Between YES and NO

Curatorial text by Christelle Havranek

“There is an openness, and together with this openness, an openness to recognise things as they appear. It is a recognition, not necessarily of something being right, but something exciting, an energy in the activity of seeing. In other words, something that you may not be able to name exactly, but which sparks associations and memories.”

— William Kentridge¹

In his book Opera Aperta Umberto Eco develops the notion of the “open work”, a work of art that, while complete, remains unfinished.² This definition fits William Kentridge’s art particularly well. Over the past forty years his oeuvre has lent itself to a multiplicity of experiences and interpretations. It opens onto a kaleidoscopic world, unfolding a vast field of possibilities.

Born in 1955, South African artist William Kentridge has created a polymorphic body of work – including drawings, films, sculptures, installations, performances, and operas – that probes the fractures of history while celebrating the power of the imagination. This spirit – at once poetic and political, sensitive, and intuitive – guided the shaping of The Battle Between YES and NO. Conceived as a collage, the exhibition is a constellation of fragments that seem autonomous yet complete one another.

The exhibition takes its title from a series of early prints and animations in which Kentridge merges the words “Yes” and “No” to create “Noise”. Playing with language, exposing contradictions, sustaining the tension between meaning and absurdity, visibility and erasure – these are among the essential traits of his approach. The Battle Between YES and NO is less a presentation than it is an exploration, where there is room for the unexpected, where resonances and confrontations reveal the meandering of creative thought. Like in the artist’s Johannesburg studio, here images, sounds, gestures, and geographies intersect, question each other, enter into dialogue, and metamorphose. The route through Kunsthalle Praha’s spaces resists both linearity and chronology. Visitors may choose to begin in Gallery 1, where they will find the most recent installation, To Cross One More Sea (2024), as well as Kentridge’s first films, made in the late 1980s. In Gallery 2 they may wander through the artist’s studio, encounter the works Right Into Her Arms (2016) and O Sentimental Machine (2015), or explore an evocation of the garden as a source of inspiration. These are the various sections of the exhibition that I will endeavour to describe in the pages that follow.

Drawings for Projection

Kentridge’s early years were marked by political involvement. While studying at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg he became one of the leaders of the student council, and in 1976 he took part in a demonstration in support of the Soweto uprising. From the outset he tried his hand at several disciplines. In the 1980s he made a name for himself on the South African art scene, though he remained largely unknown to the wider public. He exhibited drawings and prints, worked for a theatre company, wrote for cinema – and often combined these practices.

By his own admission, he came to the film-animation technique that would eventually bring him recognition almost by default:

“The films […] began because I had spent some years working on writing film scripts in the hope of making a feature film. I realised at that stage that it was going to be many years of jumping through hoops in order for me to be able to practice the craft of filmmaking. At a certain point that seemed impossible. So, the corollary of that was to find a condition of making films in which I could do them on my own.”³

The animated film Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris inaugurated the long series Drawings for Projection (eleven films to date, the last completed in 2020). It immediately stood out at international festivals. Created in 1989, its appearance coincided with a watershed moment in contemporary history: it was the year of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall, which heralded the end of the Cold War. In South Africa the imminent release of Nelson Mandela foreshadowed the collapse of the apartheid regime.

In that period of hope tinged with uncertainty, Kentridge invented a unique form of animation. His process involves a single sheet of paper, some charcoal, a few coloured pencils, and a 16mm camera. He draws, shoots two frames, erases, alters, and starts again. Unlike traditional animation based on a succession of distinct images, Kentridge preserves the traces of erasure and transformation: his drawing becomes a visible archaeology of memory. This patient back-and-forth gives rise to films that, though simple in form, carry a rare poetic and psychological depth. Without any predefined storyboard, every image acts as “a record of thinking in slow motion”.⁴

Six films are presented in the exhibition, some of the earliest from the series Drawings for Projection. Each film represents a stage in Kentridge’s exploration of memory, the city, and human relations. They are shown accompanied by “core drawings” that reveal the creative process and trace the evolution of his animation method. Each drawing continues to be altered and filmed until the end of a scene, and then these palimpsests remain as autonomous works.

Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989) introduces the three central characters of the series: mining magnate Soho Eckstein, his wife Mrs Eckstein, and her lover Felix Teitlebaum, a melancholic dreamer. Johannesburg appears as a stage on which the social and existential tensions of apartheid-era South Africa play out. The title reflects Kentridge’s visceral attachment to Johannesburg, not for its prestige but as a hometown he has “never been able to escape”.⁵ Monument (1990) explores the workings of collective memory: Soho Eckstein presides over the inauguration of a statue whose solemnity masks histories of suffering and exploitation. Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991) deepens Soho’s psychological ambiguity, presenting him as a figure wavering between authority and vulnerability. In Felix in Exile (1994), made the year of South Africa’s first democratic elections, memory becomes even more elusive: Felix moves through desolate interiors where traces of erasure stand in for what resists being remembered. Weighing and Wanting (1998) evokes the difficult labour through which the past resurfaces in fragments. By the time that Stereoscope is made in 1999, Johannesburg appears transformed yet unsettled. Soho often appears doubled, his fractured self echoing the fractures of a society in transition. The title – drawn from an optical device – suggests a doubling that produces not clarity or harmony but confusion.

James Joyce wrote that “in the particular is contained the universal”. Kentridge’s films, his distinctive method, as well as his recurring themes rooted in his own experiences resonate far beyond South Africa, capturing the spirit of an era.

The Studio: A Space for Not Knowing

Vetkoek – Fête Galante (1985) is the earliest animated film presented in the exhibition. Preceding the widely known Drawings for Projection, it is the first time Kentridge uses charcoal drawing in a film, which would become his signature. Not shown publicly for many years, this pioneering work already contains many of the elements that would shape his artistic language: drawings, texts, masks, performance. Above all, Vetkoek captures the studio as a space where the meaning of a work is happening in the making. As the artist recalls:

“I set it up in my studio, with one roll of film, and decided that whatever happened in the studio, and whoever entered it whilst I was working on the charcoal drawings, would be included.”

He continues:

“[The film] records myself, my wife, friends, our daughter Alice, her nanny, her friends, a person who came to the front door asking for food – anybody who was around the house then came into the studio and was filmed.”⁶

Since 1993, Kentridge’s studio has occupied the same address – that of his childhood home – in the heights of Johannesburg. First housed in the family home and then, from 2001 onward, in a newly built adjoining space in the garden, it is at once a laboratory and editing studio, intimate yet collaborative, filled with papers, models, prototypes, and visual and literary references. Vestiges of past projects mingle with works in progress. Like the traces of charcoal that remain on the paper despite multiple erasures, the imprint of the studio shows through in Kentridge’s work. The studio inhabits the work just as much as the work inhabits the studio. And at times the studio itself is exhibited. Very often – and even more so since the COVID-19 pandemic – Kentridge reflects on his special relationship with the studio. In interviews, lectures, and writings, he describes it as “a safe space for stupidity, for doubt, for uncertainty” and “a space for recognition” – a place of “productive procrastination”. Hesitation, error, and groping in the dark are all essential, deliberately asserted dimensions of his creative process.

In the Prague exhibition, we have dedicated a specific space to Kentridge’s studio. A genuine anatomy of the creative space, it is conceived as the nerve centre from which all of his artistic production radiates. Everyday objects and sketches appear alongside notebooks, photos, and quotations, revealing what lies behind the scenes of the artist’s work. Filling an entire stretch of wall, the Parcours d’Atelier mural – a looping, figure-eight line – graphically transposes his “walk around the studio”. The ritual walk that the artist takes as a preamble to drawing is materialised in a silent, red choreography.⁷ Recent films offer an intimate foray into the life of the studio. In the nine episodes of Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (2023) – made during the pandemic – William Kentridge stages his inner dialogues. Sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously, he speaks about culture, history, politics, and the role of art, inviting the viewer into his workspace, which has become a theatre of thought. The animated film Fugitive Words (2024) opens with the artist’s hands leafing through one of his countless notebooks – a companion to the studio. The pages very soon metamorphose into a landscape in motion, populated by fleeting words, changing images, and animated tools.

The Garden: The Paper’s Desire to Be a Tree

A natural extension of the workspace, the garden surrounding Kentridge’s studio and home serves as a fertile source of inspiration. Its abundance of plants, birds, sounds, and impressions nourishes his poetic world.

The artist says that he draws flowers mainly for the pleasure of turning paper into petals. He also does it “as a resistance to the idea of having to work on big themes.”⁸ He creates his bouquets in the form of collages, arranging multiple pieces of paper, or rather allowing these fragments to build an image on their own. Kentridge started using torn paper in the late 1980s. What first appeared in his drawings and prints as inserted fragments of newspaper or book pages gradually developed into more complex collages, silhouettes, and theatrical maquettes. He uses this process as a metaphor for discontinuity and rupture. In the mid-1990s, torn paper became central to his visual language, culminating in large-scale works where fragmentation itself structures the image, such as processional friezes or monumental trees.

Some trees – like the one created for The Battle Between YES and NO, made of paper glued directly onto the gallery wall – carry a private history: that of childhood. Kentridge has described his emotional connection to two white stinkwoods that were planted in the garden of the family home when he was nine years old – and his dismay when, as an adult, he lost one of them to a lightning strike:

“How could the tree die before me? […] How vulnerable are we or am I?”⁹

For the artist, as for the viewer, a tree evokes many associations grounded in personal memory. Kentridge speaks of the shade of a family tree: its presence in the garden of his childhood mingles with the history of his ancestors, a lineage rooted in Lithuania.¹⁰ His paternal great-grandfather, Woolf Kantorovich, arrived in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. The tree is no longer just a plant: it is identity, root, narrative.

Like the tree, the bird is a dominant motif that has always run through his work. Kentridge says:

“A bird in flight, any child knows, is easy to draw: two pencil or charcoal marks, move the marks along, change the angle of the two marks, the wing, and the bird will fly itself.”¹¹

Bird in Flight (2016–2017) is also the title of an installation included in the exhibition. The beating of a wing is broken up into twelve ink drawings, accompanied by a short video in which these phases are linked together, creating the impression of flight. This dual reading of movement can be understood as a message of freedom and hope, while echoing Muybridge’s first experiments with chronophotography. Kentridge’s interest in pre-cinematic devices also appears in What Will Come (Has Already Come) (2007), an anamorphic film projected on a table, only viewable through a cylindrical mirror. Without it, the images are distorted and stretched; the reflection reassembles them into a looping scene. Iris/Bird (2007), a related anamorphic drawing presented in the exhibition, invites viewers to move around and look closely to reveal an image, reminding us that perception is never fixed.

Thinking in Pepper’s Ghost

In 2016, with artist Bronwyn Lace, William Kentridge founded The Centre for the Less Good Idea. This collective, multidisciplinary space, directly inspired by his own methodology and creative approach, amplifies the very notion of the studio.

The name is taken from a Setswana proverb:¹²
“If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”

Transposed to art, the adage is an exhortation to turn away from initial ideas – as compelling as they may be – and to open oneself to incidental discoveries, tangents, and peripheral intuitions that arise in the course of the work.

The Centre is first and foremost a place of experimentation, research, and the emergence of new forms. It acts as an incubator of talent in Johannesburg, which lacks organisations that support creativity. The Centre for the Less Good Idea is at once a residence, workshop, and performance space. It fosters encounters that generate numerous collaborative projects, such as Kentridge’s most recent theatrical productions, which have served as catalysts for a multiplicity of voices and artistic practices.

More recently the founders have sought to take the Centre’s activity beyond its walls. In order to present their experiments as miniature narrative worlds that can travel, they revived a nineteenth-century theatrical illusion: Pepper’s ghost. Popularised by John Henry Pepper in 1862, it relies on the reflection of a half-silvered mirror that projects a figure similar to a hologram – an optical illusion that, even in the digital age, has lost none of its power to fascinate. Thus, from an old technique, they have created a new form that combines archival images, objects, sounds, performances, and projections. The result is playful and exploratory.

In 2025 Kentridge began to use the miniature diorama as a form within his own artistic practice, introducing theatricality and performance into an installation context. One such example is A Letter to Felice (2026), a homage to Franz Kafka created for the exhibition in Prague. This marks the first time that Kentridge has explicitly dedicated a work to the Prague writer, whose literature has long been formative to his thinking.

Drawing on the principles of the Pepper’s ghost illusion, the work is composed of fragments derived from around twenty texts – novels, diaries, and letters – initially selected almost at random, then cut up and rearranged to form a loose narrative structure. A Letter to Felice unfolds as a drama in six acts, centred on an assassination and on Kafka’s reflection after finding himself unwittingly implicated in it. The scenes move between morning exercises inspired by Kafka’s own routines, gestures of typing and street observation, a ballet between Kafka and Felice, and a silent film featuring performances by Kentridge wearing a Kafka mask. The historical context is evoked through military exercises and images of Prague from the 1910s and 1920s.

Infused with the artist’s own sense of the absurd, A Letter to Felice evokes the early twentieth century as a moment of fear and instability, punctuated by fleeting moments of insouciance.

O Sentimental Machine

Marked by South Africa’s political and cultural situation, Kentridge explores the position of artists and thinkers in relation to the revolutionary ideologies of the past century. Historically, communist countries supported South Africa’s anti-apartheid liberation movements. Interested in the evolution of the Soviet project, Kentridge questioned its contradictions:

“How did a project that started as emancipatory (from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs) go so wrong? A push towards both justice and equality (a naivety to think they were the same); a desire, a need, and urgency in that direction. We know the dangers of utopian thinking.”¹³

Several works probe the illusory nature of these promises of social transformation. In the film installations Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015) and Oh To Believe in Another World (2022) Kentridge evokes failed utopias rooted in two distinct historical contexts. The first turns to the aesthetics and ideological aspirations of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The second examines composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s ambivalent relationship with Stalinism.

In a similar vein, O Sentimental Machine (2015) was inspired by a little-known episode in the life of Leon Trotsky. Restaged at Kunsthalle Praha, this site-specific work was originally created for the 14th Istanbul Biennial. It grew out of Kentridge’s discovery of rare footage of Trotsky, filmed in exile on the island of Büyükada, in which he delivers a speech that was intended for Paris but was never broadcast. Consisting of five videos projected within a reconstructed landing of the Splendid Palace Hotel, where Trotsky was living, the installation mixes archival and imagined sequences. Trotsky’s words appear only in rear projection, while his secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, plays a central role with her burlesque acts.

Alternating between documentary images of Soviet Russia and interwar Istanbul, the main video gradually drifts away from the rhetoric of the speech. It unfolds into a humorous fable reminiscent of silent cinema. Trotsky’s idea of human beings as “sentimental but programmable machines” runs through the work, blurring politics, performance, and romance. Kentridge himself appears in it, parodying Trotsky with a paper beard and emphatic gestures. O Sentimental Machine is a multilayered “archive performance”, in which history becomes theatre.

Theatrical Works

William Kentridge’s attachment to theatre dates back to the 1970s, when he was a student in Johannesburg. Within the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, “a troupe of actors made up of students (white – the university was whites only) and librarians, cleaners and other staff at the university (black)”,¹⁴ he was by turns a writer, actor, printmaker, and draughtsman. The experimental South African collective invented a theatre of the absurd that was both satirical and political – and critical of the apartheid regime. Over four years of dazzling activity, Kentridge explored a variety of disciplines, until a friend warned him of the risk of spreading himself too thin. He then decided to devote himself to a single field: he would be an actor. In 1981 he moved to Paris to study at the École internationale de théâtre under the direction of the renowned mime Jacques Lecoq. There he acquired a sense of improvisation, an intuitive method, and a fresh perspective on creativity. Yet when he returned to South Africa, Kentridge doubted his talent as an actor more than ever. It was therefore in spite of himself, so to speak, that he returned to the visual arts. He subsequently chose to cross disciplines, combining drawing and performance, animation and music. His practice became a field of experimentation, where every medium nourished every other. Ironically, William Kentridge found his voice by defying his friend’s well-intentioned advice, ultimately establishing himself as one of the most singular and celebrated artists of our time. Over the years, he has embarked on increasingly ambitious projects, eventually creating his own operas.

In the late 1990s Kentridge returned to theatre, this time fully integrating his visual universe. In Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), created with the Handspring Puppet Company, puppetry, video, and archival testimony intermingle to question the memory of apartheid. It marked the beginning of a series of productions in which theatre became an extension of the studio, a site of visual and sound experimentation. Stage works such as The Magic Flute (2005), The Nose (2010), Wozzeck (2017), and Waiting for the Sibyl (2019) followed, confirming his interest in the operatic form. These productions, which lie at the intersection of theatre and the visual arts, reveal Kentridge inventing a hybrid form akin to the experiments of Josef Svoboda and Alfréd Radok, major figures of Czech theatre and the creators of Laterna Magika.¹⁵

Two projects presented at Kunsthalle Praha demonstrate this theatrical inventiveness: Right Into Her Arms (2016) and To Cross One More Sea (2024). The former refers to William Kentridge’s staging of Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu,¹⁶ which premiered at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam in 2015. It takes up the opera’s themes (desire, power, vulnerability) and integrates them into a visual and sound installation. Right Into Her Arms is a kinetic model theatre in which fragments of films, drawings, collages, and projected shadows come to life in a series of brief scenes, between tension and erasure. The soundtrack – bringing together cabaret songs by Schoenberg and Webern, archival recordings, and Kentridge’s reading of Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters – creates an atmosphere both dissonant and sensual. The monumental installation To Cross One More Sea invites visitors on a journey from Marseille to Martinique. The work echoes The Great Yes, The Great No (2024), created for LUMA Arles and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Sabine Theunissen’s scenography – evoking the interior of a cargo ship – and the combined use of sound, film, and sculptural elements convey the experience of passage and uprooting. This work was inspired by an episode that took place in 1941, when Parisian intellectuals and artists boarded a ship in Marseille to escape Vichy France. As Kentridge explains:

“Even though this ship sailed eighty years ago, the questions of assimilation and of colonialism became the holding point. The idea of the ship gives us the form. We put everybody aboard the ship, as in the medieval, even the ancient Greek idea of a ship of fools, where all of society is on board, to see what emerged.” ¹⁷

This surrealist odyssey, at once historical and fictional, brings together such figures as André Breton, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Josephine Baker, Frantz Fanon, the Nardal sisters, Joséphine Bonaparte, and still others – companions on an imaginary multi-ethnic journey across the Atlantic, fleeing the darkness of Europe under the Nazi threat.

From early films to operas, Kentridge pursues the same quest: to bring disciplines, cultures, and eras into dialogue in order to reveal the complexity of memory and thought. Sensory and immersive, the Prague exhibition shows both the extraordinary diversity of the South African artist’s practices and the coherence of his approach. Addressing colonial history, forced migrations, and asymmetrical relations – while also reflecting on the failure of twentieth-century utopias and the roles played by artists within those contexts – the exhibition makes clear that Kentridge’s narratives are never Manichaean. He does not seek to confine the work within a closed discourse. Kentridge’s art imposes no answers; it opens our eyes to the world’s ongoing questioning. It is that fabulous, perpetual Battle Between YES and NO.

¹ William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2026)

² Umberto Eco, Opera aperta (Bompiani, 1962); The Open Work (Harvard University Press, 1989).

³ Matthew Kentridge, The Soho Chronicles: 10 Films by William Kentridge (Seagull Books, 2015), 23.

⁴ William Kentridge, “Thick Time: Drawing for Projection”, in William Kentridge: Five Themes, ed. Mark Rosenthal (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009), https://www.kentridge.studio/thick-time-drawings-for-projection/.

⁵ William Kentridge, quoted in William Kentridge: Five Themes, 52: “I have never been able to escape Johannesburg. It is the place that made me. It’s the place that I know best. I have tried to escape, but there’s a kind of gravitational pull that brings me back.”

⁶ William Kentridge on Vetkoek – Fête Galante, “William Kentridge: 1984–1992”, Marian Goodman Gallery, accessed 19 December 2025, https://www.mariangoodman.com/viewing-room/21-william-kentridge-1984-1992/.

⁷ William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2026): “The drawing is the thinking before the thought is conscious. The walk around the studio is the preamble even to this.”

⁸ “William Kentridge on peripheral thinking”, video lecture, posted 1 June 2016, by Design Indaba, YouTube, 52 min. 53 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2RfYvNzjEg.

⁹ William Kentridge, “9 WORDS and one more”, William Kentridge Studio, June 2021, https://www.kentridge.studio/9-words-and-1-more.

¹⁰ William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2026)

¹¹ William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2026)

¹² Setswana is one of South Africa’s twelve official languages.

¹³ William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2026)

¹⁴ William Kentridge, A Natural History of the Studio (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2026)

¹⁵ Laterna Magika was an innovative multimedia performance created in 1958 by Czech production designer Josef Svoboda and stage director Alfréd Radok for Expo 58 in Brussels. This pioneering project combined film projection, dance, theatre, and music into a single immersive experience.

¹⁶ Lulu, an unfinished opera by Alban Berg (1929–1935) based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, was first staged in Zurich in 1937. Completed by Friedrich Cerha, the full version premiered in Paris in 1979.

¹⁷ William Kentridge, “William Kentridge in Conversation with Vassilis Oikonomopoulos and Flora Katz”, in Je n’attends plus (Luma Arles, 2024), 7.