By Maria-Christina Villaseñor, Associate Curator of Film and Media Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
In the conception of a new art work, as part of the Deutsche Bank and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s commissioning program for the Deutsche Guggenheim, William Kentridge, a South African artist very much grounded in geographies and histories of place, took Germany (The commission’s originating site) as a point of departure. William Kentridge Berlin-Arts Exhibition Within this contextual framework, the artist began to explore the history of German colonialism in Africa through the lens of its colonial era cinema. In addition to his body of work exploring the history of Africa and South Africa , Kentridge has also long exhibited an affinity to German art and culture, creating works inspired by or in response to German visual artists and literary figures.
The process was undertaken while Kentridge was preparing to direct a major production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, creating highly allusive imagery for the set designs and projections using a stage maquette. That work on Mozart’s Enlightenment-themed opera would lead Kentridge to Black Box / Chambre Noire, which explores the darker implications of that era’s philosophical legacy, reflects the key process of reversal that so often takes centre stage in the artist’s work.
In 1989 Kentridge began a series of hand-drawn, animated films that focus on apartheid- and post-apartheid-era South Africa ’s through the lens of two fictive white characters who can be seen as his alter-egos: the pensive, cautious Felix Teitlebaum and the aggressive industrialist Soho Eckstein. These films launched the artist into international prominence. Besides, Kentridge had established himself in South Africa with his work in a range of mediums, including theatre, graphic and fine arts, and filmmaking.
Kentridge’s work reflects a deep engagement with issues of history and memory. Kentridge is also known for his collaborations with the Handspring Puppet Company, with whom he has crafted complex, multimedia performances combining puppets, animation, and live performance. In theatrical productions and video sculptures, he has employed objects and their cast shadows, the puppet and the hand of the puppeteer, as well as his signature traces and erasures, to develop complex, multilayered works which call into question notions of agency.
In the work, Kentridge considers the term “black box” in three senses: a “black box” theatre, a “chambre noire” as it relates to photography, and the “black box” flight data recorder used to record information in an airline disaster. Kentridge explores constructions of history and meaning, while examining the processes of grief, guilt, culpability, and expiation, and the shifting vantage points of political engagement and responsibility. Black Box / Chambre Noire consists of animated films, kinetic sculptural objects, drawings, and a mechanized theatre in miniature.
The development of visual technologies and the history of colonialism intersect in Black Box / Chambre Noire through Kentridge’s reflection on the history of the German colonial presence in Africa, in particular the 1904 German massacre of the Hereros in Southwest Africa (now Namibia ).
Considered by some historians to be the first genocide of the twentieth century, the German massacre of the Hereros in Southwest Africa resulted in a near annihilation of the tribe. In 1885 Southwest Africa became a German protectorate. German settlers increasingly encroached upon and expropriated the land of the Hereros through fraudulent treaties and usurious practices, causing the Hereros to fall into ever-increasing circles of debt and resulting in the losses of their cattle and land. As the tribes’ frustration rose, Samuel Mahareru, the Herero chief, was pressured by his community to respond to the escalating injustices.
In 1904, he ordered his sub chiefs to carry out a directed attack against the ruling Germans, giving explicit instructions to avoid killing women, children, missionaries, English settlers, Boers, and other tribes. Stunned by this development, the German Kaiser appointed General Lothar von Trotha, known for his ruthlessness in suppressing revolts in East Africa and China , to lead a counter strike.
To escape the ensuing massacre, many Hereros fled into the Omaheke desert in an attempt to reach safety. The extreme harshness of the climate led to thousands of deaths, adding to the already significant toll of those killed directly by the troops. Despite objections by Germans in the colony as well as at home to General von Trotha’s extreme measures, it wasn’t until 1905, after seventy-five percent of the Herero population was decimated, that the General was removed from command. South Africa took control of Namibia in 1914 and ruled by force until Namibia gained its independence in 1990.
This historical fact relates to William Kentridge’s South African identity, prompting him to question notions of agency and complicity, atonement and grief. Through the artist’s unique filmic process, his drawings are in turn integrated into the Black Box / Chambre Noire film, combined with the artist’s own footage of Namibia , archival photographs and excerpts from German colonial-era film. Additionally, the music that Kentridge, together with Philip Miller, the composer of the Black Box / Chambre Noire soundtrack, encountered in Namibia has been deftly woven into the piece.
Black Box / Chambre Noire explores the difficulties inherent in representing historical trauma and in reconstructing events and people through the lens of a particular time, place, and politics, whether through the apparatus of cinema or pseudo-scientific constructions of “race.” Once again, there is no standing “outside” in Kentridge’s work. Black Box / Chambre Noire implicates us in our belief and disbelief, in our wonder and knowledge, in darkness and light.
In Kentridge’s metaphorical exploration of the Black Box as theatre, camera obscura, and flight-data recorder, flexibility, fixity, and the future come into play in an exploration of the past. Resisting closure, the work symbolises simplistic constructions of history using binaries of past and present, victim and victimizer, spectacle and spectator. The exhibition in Germany (Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin ) is free for the general public from 11:00 am 8:00 pm daily, between 29.10.2005 – 15.01.2006
African Diaspora
Senatorial Development Union and their well wishers. The occasion was marked with lots of cultural festivities, rites and abundant African menu. The special highlights of the occasion were: The award of the best African dressed ladies and Gentlemen, The presentation of the Okonko cultural Dance and the Afro-Brazilian Show. 
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admirers not only among people of African descent in Europe, (The EuroAfricans) but far beyond this group-horizon. One of the groups promoting this positive trend is The Association of Orlu indigenes living in Hamburg Germany. 
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