Next Flag 2 : William Kentridge & Olu Oguibe

From October 4 to November 30, 2003, within the context of the international project Next Flag, two rooms at Casino Luxembourg will once again function as European Satellites of the Centre of Contemporary African Art. As such they will host, after Ingrid Mwangi/Robert Hutter and Godfried Donkor, the artists William Kentridge and Olu Oguibe.To William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955) "everything is drawing". But one should not be mistaken: this South-African artist whose artistic activity is many-faceted, applies his drawings (he speaks himself of "applied drawings") - mostly charcoal on paper - as a starting point for animation films ("two dimensions moving trough time") or to include them into plays or operas of which he frequently is the director. 

At Casino Luxembourg he will present a selection of animation films from the series Drawings for Projection (collection Hans Bogatzke), which narrate the story, set in Johannesburg, of Soho Eckstein (an "über-capitalist" mine owner) and of Felix Teitlebaum (a romantic artist, Kentridge's alter ego). The films tackle the ambiguity of the (post-)apartheid era, such as the redistribution of land, the change of landscape as a result of the massive exploitation of natural resources, and the development of an own identity.In the installation Ashes by the Nigerian Olu Oguibe (1964, Aba) there is, on the one hand, the presentation of a domestic post-apocalyptical "detail" resulting from an enormous catastrophe. On the other hand, fixed on the wall, there are fictitious testimonies on paper, as if collected years after the cataclysm. The principal subject - memory - is set in the past (the catastrophe), the present (the spectator watching the installation) and the future (the testimonies), thus permitting the vision of a tragedy under different aspects of time. Quoted from memory, the many recollections of this calamity are as many notes regarding one and the same horror - without ever denying it or depicting it as banal. Only the word "ashes" is recurrent in each testimony, giving way, through the associations made by the spectator, to a sort of subliminal message, the terms of which may be summed up by the famous saying "ashes to ashes, and dust to dust".