vernissages NYC | William Kentridge "More Sweetly Play the Dance" at Marian Goodman Gallery

Immersion is the first word which came to my mind while the elevator opened to the Marian Goodman Gallery, where the multi-channel film installations More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015)  & Notes Toward a Model Opera  (2015) opened yesterday. The two installation are 2015 works by the South African artist William Kentridge (1955): More  Sweetly  Play  the  Dance was commissioned   by   the   EYE   Filmmuseum   Amsterdam   and   the   Lichtsicht- Projection  Biennale,  in  Bad Rothenfelde (Germany) and Notes  Toward  a  Model  Opera,  was firtst shown  at  the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing fin June 2015.

 

 

More Sweetly Play the Dance is defined by the gallery press release as "an eight-screen danse macabre,  reminding  one  of  the  medieval  tradition  which  summons  diverse  vestiges  of  humanity  in  a paradox  of  revelry  and  mourning.  Kentridge  presents  us  with  part  carnival,  protest,  and exodus:  a 45 metre caravan traversing in a sphere around us with figures in procession, a form the  artist  invoked  in  his  1999 Shadow  Procession." 
The  three-screen  film  installation Notes  Towards  a  Model  Opera is  part of series of works which according to by  Kentridge   “ respond unwittingly  to  the  despair  at  the  end  of  utopian projects.”