An Elegiac Work of Mourning:
William Kentridge's
Installation "Black Box / Chambre Noire" at the Museum der Moderne in
Salzburg
William
Kentridge, Untitled,
(drawing
for Black Box/Chambre Noire), 2005
Photo:
John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
An
aria from The
Magic Flute accompanies brutal scenes of a rhinoceros hunt in Southern
Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. The death of the majestic
animal in the historical film footage contrasts with the ideal of the
Enlightenment that Mozart's
opera stands for. Classical music and African dirges, dark, disturbing
images, animated charcoal drawings, and paper figures that glide over the
stage of a puppet theater as though at the hand of a ghost - William
Kentridge's Black
Box / Chambre Noire unites a high degree of aesthetic refinement
with an investigation into a historical trauma. The theme of his
multi-faceted installation, for which the Freudian
term Trauerarbeit or mourning work plays a key role, is the 1904
massacre on the Herero
tribe committed by the German colonialists in Southwest Africa,
present-day Namibia.
William
Kentridge, Scene from Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Photo:
John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
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Starting on July 25, 2006, Kentridge's elegiac miniature
theater will be on show at the Museum
der Moderne in Salzburg. Following its premiere in Berlin and
subsequent presentation at the Art
Gallery in Johannesburg, the artist's native city, the work
commissioned by the Deutsche
Guggenheim can now be seen in Mozart's birthplace, whose Magic Flute
exerted a strong influence on the development of Kentridge's installation.
Kentridge directed the opera at the Theatre
Royale de Monnaie in Brussels parallel to his work on the
installation. The stage model as object and the theme of the Enlightenment
can also be found in Black Box / Chambre Noire. Here, colonialism
appears as the dark philosophical legacy of this epoch.
William
Kentridge, Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Photo:
John Hodgkiss Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge
The
South African artist addresses a repressed chapter of German history: Black
Box/ Chambre Noire refers to the monstrous crime troops under Wilhelm
II committed in German Southwest Africa in 1904. In a painstakingly
planned massacre, the Herero tribe was nearly extinguished by German
military units - some historians classify it as the first genocide of the
20th century. The three levels of meaning in the title Black Box/
Chambre Noire refer to the theater as a "Black Box," the "Chambre
Noire" or photographer's darkroom, and the record of flight information
documenting catastrophes. The motif of the "Black Box" constitutes the
background for Kentridge's construction of history and meaning, the
process of mourning, crime and punishment - but also the shifting
perspectives of political involvement and political responsibility.
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