etching, aquatint, drypoint and soft ground

Artwork date: 1994
Signature details: signed and numbered 25/35 in pencil in the margin
Literature: Law-Viljoen, B. (2006). William Kentridge Prints. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on pp.50-51. Hecker, J. (2010). William Kentridge Trace. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on p.13.

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plate size: 55.5 x 77.5 cm

Notes:

Felix in Exile belongs to one of the most turbulent eras in South Africa’s modern history – the period after the liberation movements were unbanned in 1990 and new waves of bloodshed threatened a full blown civil war in an already combustible political atmosphere before the 1994 democratic elections. Felix appears in this period of transition and, by all accounts, liminality and instability, as a reflection of the grim social reality but also as a critique of the crisis of history and memory.

Kentridge has commented that “Felix in Exile was made at the time just before the first general election in South Africa, and questioned the way in which the people who had died on the journey to this new dispensation would be remembered” (Christov-Bakargiev 1998:90).

Indeed, how does one remember loss? What language – written, drawn, painted, voiced – can fully capture South Africa’s gruesome journey to democracy? Which metaphors are useful to account for the weight of human loss during the last bloody days of apartheid? How do we even begin to grieve and to speak of the trauma that befell humanity in this southern most point of the African continent?

If in the short animation of the same name these critical questions come to bear in the pencil stains left behind during the process of drawing and erasure in order to create the frames that construct each scene, in the 2D rendering they fall within what is shown and not shown in the nine frames that make up the latter.

Felix in Exile is a sensitive work about the lived experiences of those who are at risk of becoming mere stains of history – banal and unremembered. Kendridge, while grappling with the question of memory through his alter-ego Felix, also poses the challenge of remembering to us. In so doing, he invites us to develop a language with which to speak and engage with the trauma of modern South Africa history while imagining and engineering a new national identity.

Lwandile Fikeni

Sources:

Christov-Bakargiev, C. (1998). William Kentridge. Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles