Artist Talk: William Kentridge

Step into the studio and creative mind of William Kentridge. In this visual lecture, Kentridge explores the creative process and impulses behind his opera The Head & the Load (2018). Taking its name from a Ghanaian proverb, “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” the work continues Kentridge’s exploration of history, language, and artistic and political movements through richly layered and inventive performance. This talk goes beyond the single opera to reveal the working methods, conceptual themes, and philosophical questions that have rooted Kentridge’s remarkable, discipline-crossing career, offering clear throughlines and ever-evolving ideas across his body of work, as well as provocations that probe the power and role of art as a cultural catalyst. The Head & the Load will have its West Coast premiere on November 12–15 at Cal Performances. About the Artist William Kentridge is one of the most influential artists of our time, whose work spans drawing, film, sculpture, theatre, and opera, united by a fluid approach across media. At the core of his practice lies drawing, which he has described as a way of thinking in time — marked by erasure, movement, and revision. Growing up in Johannesburg during apartheid, in what he has called a “fractured society,” Kentridge’s work emerges from a condition of historical rupture and ethical unease. Rather than offering positions or solutions, it proceeds through uncertainty, contradiction, and provisional meaning, often articulated through irony and a dry, self-questioning humor.