South African artist William Kentridge teams up with curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who is also his friend and the author of the foundational monograph on his work published in 1998, to present his intriguing new nine-episode video series, “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot”. This intimate and remarkable presentation, close to Venice’s Giardini, is a highlight of this year’s Venice Biennale.

This show, which consists of thirty-minute segments that artist Kentridge originally produced as a web series, is a meditation on what might occur in an artist’s studio and head nowadays, as well as an experiment in embodiment and phenomenological experience in the digital age. The nine-episode series was created and directed by William Kentridge, executive produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of The Office Performing Arts + Film, Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Filmsand the William Kentridge Studio. Walter Murch supervised the editing by South African digital artist Janus Fouché and Kentridge’s regular collaborators Žana Marović and Joshua Trappler.

Captured in his Johannesburg studio amidst and following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2022, and finished in 2023, these pieces are envisaged as a singular, focused space that partially reconstructs the studio where they were created. According to Kentridge, “the studio is also an enlarged head, a chamber for thoughts and reflections where all the drawings, photos, and detritus on the walls become these thoughts.” Filming started during the first lockdown, and the space replicated the restricted surroundings of COVID.

‘Kentridge’s art is rooted in South Africa, where he continues to live and create most of his work,’ says Christov-Bakargiev. ‘It stems from an attempt to address the nature of human emotions and memory, as well as the relationship between knowledge, desire, ethics, practice and responsibility. He investigates how our identities are shaped through our shifting ideas of history and place, looking at how we construct our histories as forms of collage and what we do with them, both singularly and collaboratively. His is an elegiac yet humorous art that explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society, even in the absence of utopian visions for the future, and provides an acerbic commentary on our society, while proposing a way of seeing life as a continuous process of change and uncertainty rather than as a controlled world of facts. In this new series, Kentridge’s alter egos and doppelgängers debate over a series of issues: how does memory work? What makes the self? Why does history always go wrong? One might interpret the works as a reversal of the obsessive narcissistic split personalities of our era of avatars on social media into forms of quiet psychoanalysis.’

It’s a must-see if you’re visiting this year’s Venice Biennale and travelling to Italy.

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Images: Cover and Still from Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, Episode 1: A Natural History of the Studio (2022). HD Video, 22 min 03 sec. Photo: Courtesy of William Kentridge.