Soho Eckstein cycle

Here Kentridge’s notion of “provisionality” is embodied not only in the film’s metamorphosing figures, but also in the artist’s process of production, as marks of erasure gradually build up over the scene. On view at UCCA are all of the ten “Soho Eckstein” films to date. These and other films including Shadow Procession (1999), Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), and Second-Hand Reading (2013) together encapsulate many of the visual and narrative motifs repeated throughout his career: drawing as palimpsest, genocide as the legacy of the Enlightenment, the interdependence of shadow and light, and the hope of revolution supplanted by the terror of its collapse.