William Kentridge – The Refusal of Time

A new joint acquisition by the Met and SFMOMA, William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012) is a thirty-minute meditation on time and space, the complex legacies of colonialism and industry, and the artist’s own intellectual life. Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he still lives and works. After drama school, Kentridge was active in theater and television production in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s—coinciding with the abolishment of apartheid in South Africa—Kentridge’s live theater work and the stop-motion animated films he developed from charcoal drawings found an increasingly international audience.