The exhibition takes its title from a new 6-metre-wide triptych of the same name, where silhouetted figures form a procession against a collage of maps of Africa and archival documents. ‘Weigh All Tears’ is a phrase that cycles through Kentridge’s work, one of an evolving miscellany of phrases that recur in his work. They are ‘unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense…. fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years. On occasion they get taken out and sorted through.’
The exhibition takes its title from a new 6-metre-wide triptych of the same name, where silhouetted figures form a procession against a collage of maps of Africa and archival documents. ‘Weigh All Tears’ is a phrase that cycles through Kentridge’s work, one of an evolving miscellany of phrases that recur in his work. They are ‘unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense…. fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years. On occasion they get taken out and sorted through.’ They are also found in the empty areas of Kentridges paintings, and in the various ways in which they have been applied, rearranged, or edited. The figurative elements in the triptych are rendered in a range of colors, ranging from light to dark, and sometimes, as in the works of Barbara Bloom, they are placed as if on a panel of paper. They are sometimes taken out of the image altogether, as in the black-on-black collage-paintings of the mid 70s. The figures are often bare, but not completely, as in the black-on-black triptych, which has a variety of painted or painted-over detail, from a broken wall to a shoe. These images have been taken out of their context, which is the context of the painting itself.Kentridge is a painter who is interested in the balance between what he paints and what he thinks of as painting. In the paintings, he is interested in the relationship between the pictorial elements and their painted ones. He is interested in what happens when the painted elements are mixed with the pictorial elements and vice versa. And he is also interested in what happens when the painted elements are mixed with the collage elements and vice versa. He is interested in what happens when the painter thinks of himself as part of the painting and the painter himself as an artist. In the paintings, he is always thinking of himself as part of the painting, and his own painting as the painting of his own self. He is always thinking of his own painting as the painting of his own self, and of his self as the painter of his own self. He is always thinking of the painting as a reflection of himself, and the painting as the reflection of himself. He is always thinking of himself as the painter who has made the painting, and himself as the painter who has made the reflection.
The exhibition takes its title from a new 6-metre-wide triptych of the same name, where silhouetted figures form a procession against a collage of maps of Africa and archival documents. ‘Weigh All Tears’ is a phrase that cycles through Kentridge’s work, one of an evolving miscellany of phrases that recur in his work. They are ‘unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense…. fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years. On occasion they get taken out and sorted through.’In one piece, the words are stacked one atop the other in a way that suggests the way the body fragments, in an abstracted, imaginary, non-representational way. Here the word becomes a symbol of the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it. The word becomes a metaphor for the body, and it is inscribed in a way that is not a metaphor for it but a reflection on it.
In the past, Kentridge has presented his works in a gallery context, and the exhibition comes with a list of authors and an explanation of the meaning of the various images. Here Kentridge has added a note of his own, suggesting that the exhibition is a conceptual alternative to his earlier work. The words of the show, however, are not written down but are spoken. Kentridge has chosen to present his work as a text, and it is this writing that is at the core of the exhibition. The exhibition is not a catalogue of Kentridges work, nor is it a collection of his works, but rather a reflection on his work as a whole.
The exhibition takes its title from a new 6-metre-wide triptych of the same name, where silhouetted figures form a procession against a collage of maps of Africa and archival documents. ‘Weigh All Tears’ is a phrase that cycles through Kentridge’s work, one of an evolving miscellany of phrases that recur in his work. They are ‘unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense…. fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years. On occasion they get taken out and sorted through.’ In this case, Kentridge has filled in the gaps of the maps with a lot of wordy notes. They have been translated into a font called Morse, which is a simplified version of the original and thus a kind of graphic shorthand. The Morse is an abbreviation for Morse code, a code that is used to communicate messages from an airplane or submarine, but which was broken in the war. In the last decade of the 19th century, Morse was cracked, and the code was discovered by radio astronomers, and it has been used by submarines and airplanes. Kentridge is using the Morse to communicate the break in the codes, to suggest the impossibility of deciphering the message. The Morse is a device that is difficult to decipher, and one that Kentridge uses to suggest this impossibility. The images on display are all photographs of the Manhattan skyline, and these images are of a broken Morse code. The broken code is an image that Kentridge has used in a number of other pieces, and it is the same broken code. The point is not to reveal the secret, but to suggest that the secret is there.The pieces that were shown in the gallery are, as Kentridge puts it, ‘reminiscent of objects found in the street. These include a small, black-on-black pyramid, an empty bottle, and a paper airplane. They are all of a piece with a broken Morse code. The broken code is, in fact, a photograph of a black-on-black pyramid, which Kentridge has reproduced in a series of prints. The pyramid is a reference to the one in the photo that Kentridge took of the Manhattan skyline in the year 2000, but here it is broken. This photograph is accompanied by a letter from a social worker to the photographer that states: I am writing to you because this image is the only one I can show you that is broken.
The exhibition takes its title from a new 6-metre-wide triptych of the same name, where silhouetted figures form a procession against a collage of maps of Africa and archival documents. ‘Weigh All Tears’ is a phrase that cycles through Kentridge’s work, one of an evolving miscellany of phrases that recur in his work. They are ‘unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense…. fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years. On occasion they get taken out and sorted through.’They are the remains of broken dreams. The fragments of sentences that Kentridge has used in his work since the early 80s have been interpreted as the final fragments of a dream. In the mid-80s, Kentridge turned his attentions to the language of cinema and photography, examining the ways in which the images in a film are arranged in sequences and in relation to the images that appear in the films. For the film Cry of the City, 1987, he used the camera as a tool for rearranging images, so that the camera becomes a lens, and the actor becomes a screen. In the same way, Kentridge has used his body as a screen, and the body as a screen. In the mid-80s he created The Wedding, 1987, a film that incorporated the figure of a woman who has a dream of marrying the photographer. This dream was transformed into a film on a large screen, with a sound track composed by the artist and the composer John Lennart. This film, which Kentridge has been working on since 1992, is also a meditation on the dissolution of the boundary between the real and the filmic. It is also an expression of the artists search for a way to make sense of the unconscious.In this exhibition, Kentridge uses the filmic and the figure to explore the tension between the filmic and the filmic. The filmic is that which is suspended between the projection of an image and its subsequent reproduction. The filmic is that which is immediately visible and perceptible to the viewer. In The Wedding, the filmic is the image, the image that appears on the screen. But the projection itself is not the image. It is the projection of the projection that is visible and perceptible. The projection is the image, the projection of the image. It is the projection of the projection, the projection of the projection. It is the projection of the projection, the projection of the projection.
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