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.”