my art guides

The exhibition Vertical Thinking, curated by Giulia Ferracci, revolves around the installation The Refusal of Time by William Kentridge, created for Documenta 13 at Kassel and presented for the first time in Italy at MAXXI. Reconfigured for the spaces of the museum’s Gallery 5, the installation is an explosion of sound, images and shadows with at the centre a pulsing Leonardesque machine.

The point of departure is the idea of “standardised time”, the way in which every day humanity measures time while losing any awareness that it is merely a convention. The work references the atmosphere of the 19th Century when increasing industrialisation led to a need to synchronize one’s personal time with that of millions of other individuals. The reflection on time accompanies that on the traversing of the earth, following the various time zones and the times of sunrises and sunsets.

With The Refusal of Time, William Kentridge has realised a grandiose piece: animated films with five-channel synchronus projections into which flow the magic of theatre, drawing, music, dance and film in a commingling and wealth of idioms typical of his works. In the films, shadow dancers interact with various instruments that reference the measuring of time: cylindrical megaphones, wheels, 19th Century clocks orchestrated by giant metronomes projected on the walls. The spectator is completely immersed in the story which is both epic and fable-like and in which the shadows of the dancers chase one another and the artist himself appears and disappears through the space of imaginary maps.

On show are also 14 previously unseen silk-screen prints, including Vertical Thinking which provided the title for the exhibition; the preparatory sketches for The Refusal of Time, a maquette of the set for Refuse the Hour and six works from the MAXXI Arte permanent collection.

William Kentridge | Vertical Thinking
November 17, 2012 – March 3, 2013

MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts
Via Guido Reni, 4 A
Rome, Italy
www.fondazionemaxxi.it

Images

William Kentridge, The Refusal of time, 2012
Video Stills