Other Faces

As with other films in the Drawings for Projection series, the artist uses a 35 mm movie camera to film the successive stages of charcoal drawings that are progressively altered through erasure and overdrawing.

Other Faces returns to the figure of Soho Eckstein, the industrialist and developer who is the key protagonist of the Drawings for Projection series. In this cycle of nine films created from 1989 through 2003, Kentridge addresses the doubling and contrary sides of the self, personified in the entrepreneur/capitalist Soho and his foil, the poet/ lover Felix.

In this most recent work, pin-striped Soho Eckstein moves through a series of collisions of circumstances and recollection. In the film, the City of Johannesburg – inconstant, desperate, desiring, impenetrable – appears not so much as context as it does subject, in images of streets, facades, landscapes, and people.

Familiar and recent attributes of the city appear, with one image not just suggesting another image but indicating a connection to displaced emotions and displaced histories. There are references to the street corner civil wars of daily life, and to the xenophobic violence of the last few years.

Philip Miller, the Johannesburg composer who has worked with William Kentridge over many projects, composed the music for the film. Catherine Meyburgh, video editor for most of the artist’s video work, is the editor.

·         Also co-ordinated by Goodman Gallery, Kudzanai Chiurai’s State of the Nation exhibition opens at 50 Gwi Gwi Mrwebi Street in Newtown, on Thursday 3 November at 18:30 and closes 3 December.

The Goodman Gallery project at Arts On Main, corner Main and Berea Streets in the CBD, opens on Sunday 6 November at 12:00 and closes in January next year. Phone 011 301 5706 or write to projectspace@goodman-gallery.com

Other Faces opens at Goodman Gallery on Thursday 10 November at 18:00 and runs until 23 December. The Goodman is at 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, phone 011 788 1113 or visit www.goodman-gallery.com