BREAKING #338

She has all the answers

Column

September 2026

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

September 2026

I knew William Kentridge by name, and through works that had stayed with me over the years. Refugees (2018), for instance, which hangs at Fenix in Rotterdam. I remember the tactility of the paper, the collage, the charcoal, and I still know exactly where it hangs: at the far right of the exhibition All Directions. But I did not yet have a clear sense of his oeuvre as a whole.

I admire artists whose creative energy spills across the boundaries of disciplines, like water sloshing from a bucket. Drawings, animated films, sculpture, theatre and opera: with William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955), one thing seems constantly to flow into another. That I initially lose my bearings in it is something I would rather not admit to myself.

At Bozar in Brussels, more than four decades of his work come together in I am not me, the horse is not mine. On the steps of Bozar, I speak to him about that one unforgettable video work from his chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl: the magnificent projection of pages from an encyclopaedia filling with drawings and phrases, while a voice sings.

‘The Sibyl is a mythical figure you could go to with all your questions,’ he tells me. ‘You would go to the cave where she lived and leave your question there. She would write her answer on an oak leaf and place it at the entrance to the cave. But whenever you came to collect your answer, a wind would rise, so you never knew whether you were holding your own fate in your hands, or someone else’s.’

How does he manage, with projection, music, drawings and language, to evoke so much emotion that it almost moves me to tears? ‘The work affects many people deeply,’ he says. ‘We recorded the song shortly after the singer lost her mother. I wouldn’t know how to break that down technically, but in that voice you hear an extraordinary grief and an extraordinary consolation.’

‘For me, the power of the work lies in the combination of the words written in large letters across the book and the singer’s voice. The text of the song essentially revolves around one question: Where shall we put our hope? If we do not know our fate, if we do not have it in our own hands, how do we still manage to keep ourselves standing?’

— Nicole Ex
founding editor

Watch our video impression of the exhibition here. The interview with Kentridge will soon be available on this website.

The exhibition opened on 18 September 2026 and is on view through 7 March 2027 at Bozar in Brussels. The performance SIBYL, featuring the chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl, can be seen on 12 and 13 December 2026 at De Singel in Antwerp.