Kentridge's meaninglessness

Inspired mostly by the Dadaists, William Kentridge's latest exhibition plays with the absurd

- By Bongo Mei

William Kentridge's solo exhibition, To Cross One More Sea, was a multimedia showcase displayed at the Goodman Gallery with drawings, puppets, prints, sculpture and a three-channel film.

The 19-minute projection explored a part-historical, part-fictional ocean journey of artists, particularly surrealists, who fled Vichy France in the early 1940s.

The artworks reflected the artist's unique sensibilities and his decades of experience, which show his evolving expertise with certain materials. As always, he wittily intertwined the everyday with the political to give power to his themes – forced immigration, colonialism, despotic power – often combining images of historical figures with modern environments.

Kentridge has often claimed to have wanted to be an actor, but that he was not accepted in the field. As an artist, his charcoal film productions involve him as an actor of sorts and as a director of theatre actors, so I suppose he got his wish in the end.

Bronze sculptures and puppets