Time: May 4, 2024 (Sat.) 14:00-16:00
Venue: Auditorium, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Speakers:
Adrian Locke︱Curator, the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Stephen Clingman︱Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Agenda:
14:00－
Keynote Speech
‘The World as Animation’: William Kentridge's Art of the Boundary
Speaker: Stephen Clingman

15:00－
Panel Discussion
Speakers: Adrian Locke and Stephen Clingman

* Simultaneous interpretation in Mandarin and English provided. No reservations required.

Program Introduction
The exhibition “William Kentridge,” organized in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts and the Artist’s Studio, will be on view at the museum’s first floor from May 4 to September 1, 2024. South African artist William Kentridge (Royal Academician) was born in Johannesburg in 1955 and has been active there ever since. This exhibition revolves around Kentridge’s mastery of draftsmanship as the curatorial focus, showcasing his work from his earliest charcoal drawing to the drawings for projection in short film series, and from film directing to stage performances, as well as his recent large-scale drawings of trees and flowers using ink and charcoal, meticulously tracing his creative trajectory and aesthetic dimensions.
Co-curated by Adrian Locke, curator of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and Chaoying Wu, curator of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, this exhibition presents over 90 of Kentridge's most iconic works, divided into ten thematic sections, showcasing the brilliant creations of this globally renowned South African contemporary artist over the past 40 years. Accompanying the exhibition is the publication of the catalogue William Kentridge, authored by Stephen Clingman, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Drawing on Kentridge's themes, Clingman's erudite and accessible essays explore the artist's creative process and intellectual framework, marking a significant milestone in William Kentridge scholarship. To coincide with the exhibition opening, TFAM is pleased to present a special lecture by Stephen Clingman, followed by a conversation with Adrian Locke.

  Keynote Speech
The renowned South African artist William Kentridge grew up in the world of apartheid—a world defined by a philosophy of the hard boundary. It was a philosophy that divided black and white, that set up rigid hierarchies, that governed every aspect of life. In this context, Kentridge was drawn to making art, a form of practice that involves its own kind of vision and thought. His work did not tackle apartheid directly, but it did so obliquely even as it developed visions that resonated far beyond the South African world. Key to his work is the idea of process not only in terms of how Kentridge sets about it in the studio but internally to the work itself. The outlines of his charcoal drawings will be erased and change, and these changes become the foundation of his films, his ‘drawings for projection’. Similarly, Kentridge has worked in multiple genres and forms, including performance, opera, puppetry, and sculpture. These modes and genres communicate with one another in all his work. Central to it is the crossing of space, both in his process and vision and across the multi-modalities of his art. Against a philosophy of the hard boundary, Kentridge offers a model of provisionality and discovery, liberating vision in his own way. He operates within and across the space of the boundary as the site of his extraordinary creativity.

Introduction of Speakers
Stephen Clingman
Stephen Clingman is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the English Stephen Clingman is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the English Department from 1994-2000, and was founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute (and its earlier incarnation, the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts) from 2001-2017. At the University of Massachusetts, Stephen was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor given to faculty by the campus. Stephen was born and grew up in South Africa where he studied as an undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand; he received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He has held fellowships at a variety of institutions internationally, including Yale University, Cornell University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. Stephen has written on a range of topics across the disciplines. His literary critical work includes a book on the South African writer and Nobel Prize winner, Nadine Gordimer (called ‘the best study’ on the subject on the Nobel website), as well as an edited volume of Gordimer’s literary and political essays titled The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, which was translated into a number of languages. His book, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, a biography of the lawyer and political figure who led Nelson Mandela’s defense at the Rivonia Trial, was co-winner of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction. Stephen has also published The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary, and Birthmark, a memoir/autofiction. Most recently, Stephen was commissioned to write the catalogue for the South African artist William Kentridge’s 2022 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London—the most substantial exhibition to date of Kentridge’s work in the UK. The exhibition has now moved to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan, where the catalogue has also been translated and published.

Adrian Locke
After completing a PhD in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex in 2001 Adrian Locke joined the Exhibitions Department at the Royal Academy of Arts. Since then he has worked on a diverse portfolio of over twenty ground-breaking and award winning exhibitions that range from major surveys of contemporary artists, including Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, and William Kentridge to cultural explorations such as Aztecs, Turks: A journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600, Byzantium 330-1453, and Oceania, and smaller, focussed exhibitions such as Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940, Leon Spilliaert, and Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist. He has lectured and published widely. Adrian has also worked collaboratively on exhibitions for other institutions including Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brazilian Embassy in London and the V&A. 

Notice

• Tickets are required for admission to this event. For ticket information and free admission, please refer to TFAM website.
• Please refer to the official website for any changes to the program.

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