The heaviest things we carry are often weightless. Informed by South Africa’s sociopolitical strife, William Kentridge’s five-decade-long practice imbues material heft to the intangible weight of history, while critiquing notions of certainty and reflecting the human urgency to understand our world.
Kentridge’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, “Weigh All Tears,” offered a cohesive slice from the past five years of the Johannesburg-born artist’s vast body of (2021), with its timber unpainted and bolts exposed, opened the presentation via the artist’s philosophical question: “What is the minimum you need to be unable to resist the image of a horse?” The viewer sees that the object before them is a ladder while inevitably constructing a horse from its shape and arrangement, effectively completing the work. For Kentridge, “There is something in our need to make sense of the world that translates it into a horse, however imperfect or rudimentary it is.”
