William Kentridge

William Kentridge's work may be said to bear a similar relation to his nation's traumatic history of racial oppression, his animated films of a recurrent cast of characters in the penultimate moments of apartheid and its aftermath . Charcoal drawing as a process of marking, reworking and erasure questions history and memory, the decimated South African landscapes and cities , its human inhabitants and inheritors are in a state of constant flux. Kentridge has described the situation in South Africa as a struggle between forces of forgetting and the resistance of remembrance between amnesia and memory. He has also used shadow and shadow play of more antiquated visual culture which as opposed to his standard practice of altering charcoal drawings is composed entirely of torn paper cutouts and found objects photographed as they shifted across a translucent surface. Spectrality or shadow plays delights the audience in being fooled into a space of reality and illusion , between performance and performer.