Tapestries

South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) has produced an outstanding body of work in multiple mediums - drawings, animations, sculptures, theatre and stage design - all of which trace the fraught political and cultural history of South Africa. This book is the first to explore Kentridge´s exciting new series of seventeen large-scale tapestries, created under his artistic direction by a team of South African weavers between 2001 and 2007. The tapestries depict shadowy figures that derive from his collages of itinerant characters set against the web-like backgrounds of 19th-century maps of Europe and Johannesburg. A distinguished group of authors relate the tapestries to the rest of Kentridge´s heterogeneous oeuvre, underline the centrality of drawing in his practice, and illuminate the connection between the tapestries and South African geography and history. Together they position Kentridge´s tapestries as furthering his critical examination of issues surrounding memory and conflict in the context of societies that, while rife with violence, strive for peace and reconciliation.