William Kentridge's solo Sharjah exhibition has shadows of medieval Arab theatre

Past performances by celebrated South African artist is told through props, illustrations, scale models and installations

A Shadow of a Shadow is South African artist Willam Kentridge's first major solo exhibition in the region. Antonie Robertson / The National

In the medieval Arab world, shadow theatre was not merely a form of entertainment but an instrument of truth. And among its most revered practitioners was Muhammad Ibn Daniyal.

The playwright emigrated to Cairo from Mosul as a teenager to escape the Mongol invasion. This catastrophic experience and sense of injustice translated into many of his plays. Through puppets and silhouettes, Ibn Daniyal found the means to expose corruption and challenge societal conventions with a stinging satire. His most notable work is A Shadow of a Shadow, which depicts the customs of 13th century life in Egypt while making light of the political situation of the time.

It is this play that lends its title to William Kentridge’s first major solo exhibition in the region, taking place at the Sharjah Art Foundation. It may seem like a strange pairing at first. After all, what does the South African artist have in common with a medieval playwright from the Arab world?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. While Kentridge is known for his work as an illustrator, filmmaker and sculptor, the artist has also been a prolific theatre-maker. It is this aspect of the artist that A Shadow of a Shadow focuses on. The exhibition explores 17 performances by Kentridge, spanning from the late 1980s to the present. It reveals Kentridge’s prowess in taking classic works and adapting them to reflect contemporary issues. Through props, illustrations, scale models and installations, A Shadow of a Shadow pulls back the curtain on one of theatre’s most interesting and provocative figures, all while making visitors feel like they are part of the performances themselves.

Kentridge’s similarities with Ibn Daniyal are drawn early on in the exhibition. It opens with a wall-sized illustration of two bulbous and moustached figures in confrontation. One bellows into a megaphone, while the other has his arm up in protest. In the centre of the space is the frazzled form of a cat, rendered as a silhouette. However, stand at just the right place and the cat transforms into the shadow of a coffee pot.

The room, and the works within, are a tribute to Kentridge’s many projects around the Ubu Roi, the 19th-century play by Alfred Jarry that parodies several Shakespeare works, including Macbeth and Hamlet.

“I wanted to start with the absurd,” says Tarek Abou El Fetouh, director of performance and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation. El Fetouh curated the exhibition with Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the foundation’s president and director.

Abou El Fetouh points out that while Kentridge has had a career-long fascination with Ubu Roi, even acting in an adaption in 1975, his most famous take on the play came in 1997 when he directed Ubu and the Truth Commission. The work by South African playwright Jane Taylor takes cues from the original play to protest the racist practices of apartheid South Africa.

“The story of King Ubu represents what happens when authority goes unchecked and falls to madness,” Abou El Fetouh says. “And the apartheid was very much a madness.”

While the opening space offers a glimpse at this project, a room further on in the exhibition delves deeper into Ubu and the Truth Commission, showing how Kentridge incorporated elements of shadow theatre for the production. The room presents charcoal drawings by Kentridge that were as much drawings for the play as they are artworks in themselves. It is this work, perhaps, that most potently draws the connection between Kentridge and Ibn Daniyal.

The other projects, nonetheless, exhibit Kentridge’s propensity for adapting timeless plays and novels with contemporary social commentary. These include his two performances based on Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience. The 1923 novel is seen as a hallmark of modernist literature, but was tricky to adapt for the stage, considering it is written in the form of a diary. Produced in 2001 and 2002, Kentridge’s two plays focus on Zeno’s inner world all the same with a backdrop of the First World War.

It shows the character struggling to take control of his life, symbolised by his failure to quit smoking. The play makes use of real-life footage of a collapsing Austrian empire, juxtaposed with animations of Zeno smoking. It also has torn-paper renditions of the landscapes of German painter Caspar David Friedrich, as well as handwritten notes about the experiences of soldiers in the front lines.

Other adaptations include Kentridge’s reimagining of the Mozart classic opera The Magic Flute. “Kentridge applied the opera in the context of Johannesburg,” Abou El Fetouh says. He notes that Kentridge’s version, which was presented in 2005, also delves into the play’s original themes, such as the tension between good and evil, knowledge and ignorance. However, the play has been reframed to address the painful legacy of colonialism, exemplified with Kentridge’s incorporation of the African white rhino.

While Kentridge is known to tackle difficult themes and topics, he often does so with a measure of wit. While this is apparent in several works, it is perhaps particularly potent in his adaptations of Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, a short story that lends itself easily Kentridge’s humour.

Kentridge made several drawings, performances and installations based on the story of a Russian bureaucrat who wakes up one morning to find his nose has escaped him and has managed to outrank him in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

The story was adapted into a 1930 opera by the legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Kentridge directed his own take of the opera for the Metropolitan Theatre in New York in 2010, setting the story in the 1930s, when Russia was under Stalin’s rule.

A Shadow of a Shadow features several drawings and props that were used for the performance, including costumes and the backdrop. The final stretch of the exhibition takes cues from Kentridge’s oeuvre to create something new.

Much like the maquettes throughout the exhibition, which recreate Kentridge’s stages as they once existed, a diorama of Bait Al Serkal is displayed, showing the full layout of A Shadow of A Shadow, including the exhibited works and scenography.

The maquette, perhaps, comes as a reminder that this amalgamation of performances, this medley of different props, themes and topics, is a performance in itself. A rhythmic flow of sounds, visuals and narratives moving across the historical house in Sharjah, which can only be holistically observed at its conclusion.

William Kentridge's A Shadow of a Shadow runs at the Sharjah Art Foundation until December 8