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William Kentridge, Anti-Mercator, 2010-2011 & Untitled, Drawing for Black Box / Chambre Noire, 2005

William Kentridge, Refusal of Time Anti-Mercator, 2010–2011

Distorted perception of the world
“Refusal of Time” appears in large letters on the first page of the notebook opened in William Kentridge’s video work, like a chapter heading. But what time is being refused here? The title of the film offers a clue: Refusal of Time Anti-Mercator. Gerardus Mercator was a geographer and cosmographer of the sixteenth century who laid the foundations for the modern atlas. The Mercator projection named after him allowed ships to maintain their course and revolutionized colonial seafaring in the centuries that followed. His projection is still used today, even though it distorts the size of various countries, especially Africa, on the world map.

History and memory
In his animated film, Kentridge shows that our understanding of time and Western techniques of measurement are tools of modernity through which control and power are exercised. The works of the South African artist reflect his intense engagement with questions of history and memory, above all with colonialism and the history of apartheid. Kentridge is known for his theater productions, for which he creates complex multimedia performances combining objects and their shadows, puppets and puppeteers in, moving image projections and stage sets. He repeatedly uses reworked charcoal and pastel drawings as the basis for his films, in which he can be seen writing and drawing. In doing so, he leaves traces of erasure and clearly visible overpainting, suggesting both the creative process of the work and an indelible past.

A glimmer of hope
The concepts of time and measurement that Kentridge questions are inventions of European, Western, colonial culture, through which the world is measured solely from the perspective of those in power. Closely linked to this is the insistence on a monolithic, chronological history that is equally one-sided and overwrites and erases the histories of the colonized. In his video, Kentridge writes and erases against this narrative, engaging with different conceptions of time and space, from Isaac Newton’s linear concept of time to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. As in the nineteenth-century motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, the video moves forward while the pages are turned backward. A protest march—or procession—appears, featuring constructions made from megaphones and measuring devices. A Black couple in cubist costumes dances carefree to birdsong: a glimmer of hope.

William Kentridge
Untitled, drawing for Black Box / Chambre Noire, 2005
Untitled, drawing for Black Box / Chambre Noire, 2005
Untitled, drawing for Black Box / Chambre Noire, 2005

Mechanical theater
Experiencing and understanding the world is a long and painful process in which nothing remains static. Kentridge demonstrates this not only in his video work Refusal of Time Anti-Mercator but also in Black Box / Chambre Noire, a commissioned work he realized in 2005 for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The mechanical theater is almost life-size and consists of a black box with two projections and six figures which, similar to those in Anti-Mercator, can also take the form of animated objects, lamps, or megaphones.

Opera of the Enlightenment
The work originated while the artist was preparing to stage a major theater production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. During this time, Kentridge designed large-scale stage sets and developed the staging of performers and projections using a miniature stage model. This work on the opera, together with its associated historical theme of the Enlightenment, ultimately led to the creation of Black Box / Chambre Noire.

Mourning
The miniature theater and the fifty accompanying drawings address the massacre of the Herero people by German colonial forces in 1904 in South West Africa (today Namibia). Some historians consider this event to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. Kentridge approaches this historical subject in the manner of an epic, surreal chamber opera. In confronting this event, the artist engages with Sigmund Freud’s concept of “mourning” (Trauerarbeit) as a process without end. This ongoing investigation aligns with the artist’s relentless and self-reflective engagement with meanings and processes, whether historical or artistic. The two drawings on found paper, which also formed part of the projections in the Black Box, depict a bust of Otto von Bismarck and a skull beneath a hat. Both sheets are marked with notations and measuring lines. The skull is not only a reference to death and violence but also recalls a practice from the era of German colonial rule. In particular, in the so-called “protectorates” of German South West Africa and German East Africa, skull measurements (craniometry) and other anthropometric examinations were carried out on a massive scale. These practices served racial-anthropological research intended to legitimize colonial rule and to provide pseudo-scientific proof of the supposed “superiority” of white settlers.