South Africa: Enlightenment's Shadow

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Johannesburg — WHEN the Nazis seized power in Germany, poet Bertold Brecht asked the question: "What times are these, when to speak of trees is almost a crime/for it is silence about innumerable outrages?" Trees galore feature in William Kentridge's new exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Black Box/Chambre Noire: charcoal trees stark against the Namibian landscape; trees upended and calibrated through a Zeiss lens; trees bearing the strange fruit of hanged Herero rebels. And when we take Brecht's measuring stick to the exhibition, we walk out feeling we have encountered a giant.

Visually, Black Box is compelling: conflicting and emerging, light-dark, line-shadow, movement and depth; textures upon shapes becoming symbols that shift from one meaning to the next, from sketch to form to thought, through a range of discovery, transformation, fantasy, recognition and memory.

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