William Kentridge: the studio as a space of thought, history, and inner division

William Kentridge’s exhibition Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, presented at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice from 17 April to 24 November 2024, functioned neither as a conventional exhibition nor as a mere projection of a film cycle. Rather, it unfolded as a complex, essayistic spatial environment in which film, drawing, object, prop, text, and the viewer’s time in the space formed a single living organism. At its core was a nine-part video series, developed during and after the pandemic in the artist’s studio in Johannesburg, which Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in her accompanying text, described as an “enlarged head” — a chamber of thought, memory, and inner dialogue. This is not simply a beautiful metaphor, but a key to understanding the entire exhibition: for Kentridge, the studio is not the backdrop to creation, but the very site where the self is continuously dismantled, reassembled, and tested through the process of work. (carolynchristov.com)
One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths lies precisely in the way it refuses to mythologize the creative process as the secret domain of artistic genius. Instead, it reveals it as an unstable field of thought, doubt, improvisation, delay, repetition, and internal conflict. In the films, Kentridge often appears in dialogue with his own double, as if thought itself had materialized in a split between the rational and the imaginative self. The self-portrait, then, is not presented as a stable image of identity, but as something constantly being formed and at the same time undermined. Agnese Torres of Lampoon Magazine was therefore entirely right to note that the exhibition offers no definitive answers, but opens up questions of memory, death, fate, will, and self-image; its central mechanism is not explanation, but reflection in motion. That is where the force of Kentridge’s work lies: the self is not a fixed entity, but an effort, a rhythm, and the trace of an artistic act. (Lampoon Magazine)
The exhibition is also deeply compelling because it thinks through material. Ink, charcoal, paper, collage, cut-outs, puppets, masks, stop-motion, sound inserts, and improvised props are not illustrations of a pre-existing idea, but its active carriers. Kentridge insists on the hand, on bodily gesture, on the stain, the cut, the erasure, and the act of drawing again; in doing so, he resists the smooth logic of digital seamlessness and the artwork as a polished effect. Jo Lawson-Tancred of Artnet News perceptively observed that the curatorial installation, however highly considered, still preserves a sense of creative spontaneity, while handmade objects, notes, newspaper clippings, and wall drawings almost monastically condense the atmosphere of the studio without sterilizing it. For that reason, the exhibition also matters as an argument for the materiality of thought: it does not celebrate the analog out of nostalgia, but shows that working through material remains one of the most powerful forms of reflection. (Artnet News)
Yet with Kentridge, introspection never remains merely private. Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is, in truth, an exhibition that continually opens the studio outward toward history: toward colonial topographies, the mining economy of South Africa, the violence of apartheid, the European avant-garde, Soviet utopia, and the contemporary digital fragmentation of consciousness. This is especially evident in the episodes that connect landscapes of memory with the mining landscape of Johannesburg, or in those where the question of language and history intensifies through the relationship between art, colonialism, and political violence. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos of Anthropocenes accordingly described the exhibition as a “gem,” emphasizing that the space feels more like a research cabinet or study room than a white gallery cube. The point is essential: Kentridge’s studio is not a refuge from the world, but a place where the world, with all its historical fractures, is reassembled in image, word, and gesture. (Anthropocenes)
It is equally important not to read the exhibition too narrowly as the artist’s intimate diary. Although it emerged from a period of pandemic isolation, its ambition is much broader. In her accompanying essay, Christov-Bakargiev defines it as an experiment in embodiment and phenomenological experience in the digital age, and at the same time as a meditation on what today takes place in the studio and in the artist’s mind. This duality — between the private and the historical, the biographical and the civilizational — is one of the project’s most powerful dimensions. Jackie Wullschläger of the Financial Times therefore singled it out as one of the standout collateral projects of the Venice season, describing it as a reconstruction of Kentridge’s polymathic studio, where Dada, utopia, Shostakovich, and drawing meet within a single, densely charged spatial language. Kentridge does not construct a harmonious whole, but an open field of thought in which personal memory and collective history continually overlap. (ft.com)
Particularly fascinating is the exhibition’s relationship to digital contemporaneity. Kentridge does not reject technology head-on, nor does he cultivate the illusion that a return to some pre-technological innocence might be possible. On the contrary, he thinks the digital age from within, through its dispersion, narcissistic splitting, algorithmic predictability, and the atrophy of attention. The accompanying essay explicitly states that the series acts as a warning against retreat into digital spaces and against overreliance on technical prostheses of thought. Yet Kentridge does not answer this with a programmatic manifesto, but with an aesthetic strategy of fragmentation, interruption, montage cuts, and deliberately roughened images. It is precisely in this “imperfection” that his work feels most contemporary. It does not try to compete with digital flawlessness, but disarms it by restoring the value of error, doubt, delay, and the gesture of the hand. (carolynchristov.com)
For all its undeniable strength, however, the exhibition is not without risks. Its essayistic breadth, associative density, and intellectual diffuseness are both its greatest achievement and its potential weakness. The nine episodes are not equally concentrated throughout; some are exceptionally sharp, especially where questions of subjectivity, history, and language are anchored in concrete political references, while elsewhere the work more easily slips into the allegorical, into a witty but less precise theatre of interiority. This is not a failure so much as the limit of the project: the exhibition is at its strongest when it keeps its meditative openness in close contact with material and historical reality. For that reason, it is important not to mistake its effect for admiration of artistic authority alone. The reception was overwhelmingly favorable, yet the task of serious criticism is precisely to see in such density not only richness, but also the question of measure. (Artnet News)
And yet it is exactly this imperfect, open, and contradictory quality that makes Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot one of the more important Venetian presentations of 2024. Kentridge offers neither a utopia nor a clear program, but something more demanding: he shows that art can still be a place where thought occurs through work, through material, through inner conflict, and through the weight of history that cannot simply be resolved. His studio is not a sanctuary of artistic inwardness, but a site of friction between the world and the subject. That is why the exhibition resonates so powerfully: because it understands the self-portrait not as an affirmation of the self, but as its continual testing. At a time when images are increasingly produced without resistance, without weight, and without risk, Kentridge demonstrates that it is still possible to think slowly, materially, and with all the discomfort that such thinking demands. (Artnet News)