- Dates: March, 12–February 7, 2021
- Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
- Film & Video gallery (103)
From March 12 to June 14, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents William Kentridge: 7 Fragments, the first exhibition of the 2020 programming season of the Film & Video gallery, a space devoted to presenting seminal works of video art and video installation and exploring the moving image as a key artistic language of our time.
The exhibition features three works by acclaimed artist William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg) with more than four decades of work in film and video art. In this nine-screen presentation, Kentridge invokes French filmmaker Georges Méliès, a founding genius and pioneer of cinema, simultaneously creating a dreamlike self-portrait and a representation of the studio as a microcosm. Kentridge’s black-and-white film installation mixes live-action footage with his signature stop-motion drawing technique, in which he makes a large charcoal drawing, exposes it to the camera, then erases and redraws certain areas. As the process repeats, each image in the resulting animation is suffused with the smudges of the earlier frames, prompting a powerful reflection on the making and disappearance of images as indissolubly tied moments.