About this event
Renowned South African artist William Kentridge has engaged with the book in all its forms throughout his career. While his early work in the 1980s and 90s frequently incorporated found paper and fragments, his 1999 project Curs Pràctic de Gramàtica Catalana, based on a facsimile of a 1933 Catalan grammar, established the ‘book-as-object’ as a sustained concern.
This public conversation examines the enduring role of the book in Kentridge’s work, from his iconic flip-book animations to his use of the page as a site of historical palimpsest and erasure.
Speakers
William Kentridge (1955, Johannesburg) works across mediums of drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theatre and collaborative practices, to make work that is grounded in politics, science, literature and history, always holding a space for contradiction and uncertainty. His work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s and can be found in the collections of art museums and institutions across the globe. He has directed operas for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, English National Opera in London, the Sydney Opera House and the Salzburg Festival. His original works for stage combine performance, projections, shadow play, voice and music, and include the Refuse the Hour, The Head & the Load, Waiting for the Sibyl and The Great Yes, The Great No.
Kentridge is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale, Columbia, Brown and the University of London. He has presented public lecture series at Harvard University and Oxford University. Awards include the Kyoto Prize and the Praemium Imperiale Prize (Japan), the Princesa de Asturias Award (Spain) and an Olivier award (London). He is an honorary academician of the Royal Academy in London and a Foreign Associate Member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Peter McDonald teaches English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-making the Reader (2024), Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009), British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (1997), and co-author of PEN: An Illustrated History (2021). He is currently working on a book about re-imagining a literary education in the age of artificial intelligence.
Event information
- This event takes place in person in the Sohmen Concert Hall at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
- Tickets are £3 for general admission, and free for students.
