The motif of the colander has often appeared in the work of renowned South African artist William Kentridge, eliciting how and when formative state and institutional structures give way, beginning with his examination of post-apartheid South Africa and extending to authoritarian ideologies, regimes and failed states in other parts of the world. Migration, the vulnerability and provisionality of memory and historical account, the absurd and the capricious nature of power and perception in the architecture of socio-political life, are concepts that run throughout Kentridge’s expressive work. Formally, fragmentation and assemblage itself is a conceptual and methodological tool for how the works are made, ordered, shaped and re-ordered in his drawings, films, performances, set design, prints, paintings and sculptures.

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This exhibition presents the first solo exhibition to be held in Vancouver on the work of this eminent artist and includes key works from the 1990s through to never-before-seen projects produced in 2020-2021. Drawing from private collections in Western Canada as well as a selection of previous works, including the decades long film cycle, Drawings for Projections (1989 – 2020), this exhibition also features new works from the Kentridge Studio, South Africa produced during the global pandemic.

William Kentridge: The Colander explores the critique of political structures in Kentridge’s printmaking and filmmaking—looking at the layered, kinetic and collaged nature of his formal working processes, to investigate the porousness and vulnerability of artmaking and life—as well as the processes of the studio in his most recent series, Studio Life.