In the 2026–2027 season, Bozar presents William Kentridge – Grand Invité, a large-scale, tailored-made exhibition conceived specifically for its 13 exhibition rooms. The title of the exhibition may be fully understood only by a Russian-speaking visitor. “Я не я и лошадь не моя” (“It’s not me, and the horse isn’t mine”) is a phrase we use in everyday speech as a metaphor for having nothing to do with something we consider, as a rule, somewhat “not quite proper”. I asked Kentridge, whose Jewish family emigrated from the Russian Empire (Lithuania) to South Africa following the pogroms of 1903–1904, whether he had heard the phrase at home. You never know – perhaps idioms of one’s ancestors can travel across generations, even when they are spoken in another language. “I came across the phrase in Bukharin,” was his answer, leaving me momentarily speechless.
This did not surprise me entirely, as I am well aware that political engagement has been present in Kentridge’s work from his very first drawings, which he magically transforms into animation. In the 1970s, Kentridge’s father was a lawyer for Nelson Mandela. The Bolshevik Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin appears in the third room in a darkly comic dialogue with Stalin, who had travelled from being a fellow revolutionary to becoming his executioner. The USSR as a totalitarian system is one of the countries and political realities at the heart of Kentridge’s work.
The Bozar exhibition reveals the performative and collective nature of Kentridge’s practice, showing how art can become a space for political enquiry, historical reflection and poetic transformation. One of Kentridge’s tools is absurdity. A striking example is the way Soviet power ultimately “strangled” the Russian avant-garde – an art movement that had celebrated the Revolution, employed its slogans and produced propaganda posters, seemingly embodying the very spirit of the new regime. It is hardly surprising, then, that Kentridge devoted an entire project to Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist The Nose and Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera of the same name.
The exhibition is, in effect, William Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio recreated by Bozar, both physically and conceptually. It is a space for drawing and experimentation, but also a place for rehearsals, editing, set construction and design. It is a remarkably theatrical exhibition, reflecting the fact that Kentridge has spent his entire career creating theatre. In 1995, Brussels hosted the premiere of his now-legendary production Faustus in Africa!. Rather than a traditional retrospective, curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh has conceived the exhibition as a musical score in several movements, inspired by shifting rhythms and the compositional structures of Kentridge’s stage works.
On the steps of Bozar, visitors are greeted by a portrait-collage of the South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo (1985–2024), with whom Kentridge worked extensively. We saw two of her extraordinary ballet productions at De Singel. This is his homage to a colleague whose life and career were cut tragically short.