Astonishments and violences fill the Royal Academy’s survey show of Johannesburg-born artist William Kentridge. Glimpses of hangings and torture, sex in the pool, old footage of a white hunter skipping towards the rhino he has just downed in order to give it a final shot in the head. An ampersand turns into a gallows and bits of a body are flushed away in the shower. Snatches of crackly operatic aria, lilting African song and paranoid voices on the telephone fill the air, along with the regular chink of a miner’s hammer against a rock. Kentridge’s show is filled with sounds and furies.
Now in his late 60s, Kentridge spent more than half his life living under apartheid. The system itself, and the complications of its aftermath, have been his key subjects. The artist’s parents were both lawyers, playing prominent roles defending human rights and those accused of treason.
