What Will Come (Has Already Come)

William Kentridge’s art addresses the nature of human emotions and memory, as well as the relationship between desire, ethics and responsibility. He explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society, and yet provides a satirical commentary on that society.

What Will Come (Has Already Come) (2007), a film seen in a cylindrical mirror on a table, is composed of revolving images – from familiar carousel animals through to tanks and aeroplanes. I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008) is a multi-channel projected work based on The Nose (1837) by Nikolai Gogol. The work is part of an ongoing interest in the roots and trajectory of modernism: a mixture of the absurd, the self-reflective (and the ‘self-divided’), and the forms of fragmentation that one associates with modernism, its crushing in Russia in the 1930s and the long-term trajectory of the terrors of hierarchy.

Both artworks were presented on Cockatoo Island for the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008).