I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008)

This interest in the delusions inherent to idealism is also found in his I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), a project born out of Kentridge’s 2009 take on Shostakovich’s rarely performed opera The Nose. Combining video and installation with a lecture-like filmic performance, the artwork is an elegy for Russian Modernism in the face of political upheaval, the rise and fall of the avant-garde during the 1917 revolution ultimately revealing the perils of utopianism.

As the artist has noted, “I am not me, the horse is not mine is both a celebration and an elegy–a celebration of the extraordinary creative outpouring unleashed by the 1917 Revolution and its hope and promise of human transformation; and the elegy of the dashing of these.”