Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The streets surrounding William Kentridge\u2019s home in northern Johannesburg are lined with trees of exorbitant beauty: jacaranda, blue gum and London planes arch overhead to form a luminous-green tunnel. The light in \u201cthe city of gold\u201d, as it is named for the reefs of\u00a0mineral on which it is built, is always stunning, but the scenery is usually far grittier. As I round a steep corner in my car, the sun\u2019s rays are so dappled it would give the American \u201cpainter of light\u201d Thomas Kinkade a run for his money. I\u00a0pull over to take a photograph. I\u2019m clicking away when a man barely dressed in rags bangs on my car window and\u00a0starts screaming obscenities.It turns out that I\u2019ve stopped right in front of Kentridge\u2019s home, which feels apt. The work of South Africa\u2019s greatest living artist is deeply rooted in the city in\u00a0which he has lived for most of his life. The contrast between the affluent street submerged in sunlight and the failed promises that have left the metropolis struggling with homelessness and broken services are an ever-present undercurrent in his works, whether in his rough-hewn charcoal drawings of trees or experimental animations depicting post-apartheid South Africa.\u00a0I walk up the driveway to the English arts and crafts\u2011style house where he lives with Anne Stanwix, his\u00a0wife of more than 40 years, a rheumatologist. Sitting in the light-filled home studio in his garden, Kentridge tells me the deep political vein that runs through his works isn\u2019t always conscious. It \u201csort of sinks in\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. in ways that I\u2019m not aware\u201d, he says. White-haired with a shock of white eyebrows and dressed in a crisp white Oxford shirt, he has the air of a professor, at once pensive and appraising. Although he\u2019s \u201cnever thought of the work\u00a0as being a history of Johannesburg, if you put the films next to each other, they become a kind of history of\u00a0what\u2019s happened in the city\u201d.\u00a0The house itself, designed by the English architect Frank Emley and his partner Frederick Williamson in the early 20th century, is the one he grew up in, and which he\u00a0inherited from his parents when they relocated to London in the 1990s. Accordingly, it still has \u201ccupboards full of relics from the 1960s \u2013 my father\u2019s military uniform, my mother\u2019s wedding dress.\u201d\u00a0To that he has added a significant collection of prints, including an etching by D\u00fcrer of a rhinoceros and another by Edward Hopper, puppets from his theatre productions, and his own sculptures and drawings. An entire wall of the living room is lined with his small bronze sculptures, which he has described as the symbols that form his artistic vocabulary: an open pair of scissors, a gramophone, a horse walking along. Tapestries, rugs and wall hangings cover the walls and floors. And there are hints of the presence of his small grandchildren, such as a treehouse in the beautiful English country garden, about the house.\u00a0There are also lush, neatly trimmed lawns and sumptuous ornamental plants, many planted there during his boyhood by his parents. Alongside a mature belhambra tree are jacarandas, which will spread a carpet of purple flowers in spring, and cacti. \u201cWe worked very hard on it since our daughter wanted to get married in the garden. What was meant to be a six-month project has been 10 years and ongoing.\u201d He has another studio, an art centre which he runs with the Botswana-born\u00a0visual artist Bronwyn Lace called The Centre for the Less Good Idea, which they use for experimental, multidisciplinary art and theatre projects with local artists. The name comes from a Setswana proverb, \u201cif the good doctor can\u2019t cure you, find the less good doctor\u201d, and reflects Kentridge\u2019s abiding desire to stay connected. \u201cThe space in town, the other studio, is very different,\u201d he says. \u201cOtherwise you live in a bubble \u2013 it\u2019s not Johannesburg.\u201dOf course, Kentridge\u2019s works go beyond chronicling one of Africa\u2019s grandest metropolises. You can also see traces of the events that have defined South Africa: from the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, where police fired on peaceful Black protesters, to the 2021 riots across South Africa against the ruling ANC party.\u00a0\u201cWhat\u2019s amazing about William\u2019s work is that, yes, it\u00a0is political. But by the same token, it has a strong personal and philosophical aspect to it, so it transcends our history,\u201d says Liza Essers, the owner of the Johannesburg-headquartered Goodman Gallery, which has represented him for more than three decades. \u201cIt resonates hugely for people [everywhere].\u201d\u00a0All this is achieved through what one critic described as a \u201cdarkly imaginative circus\u201d of print-making, drawing, theatre, animation and music, which has been exhibited everywhere from the Louvre to the Met. Today, his works on paper sell for an average of around \u00a370,000, while his record is more than \u00a31mn for a multi-part bronze sculpture. He is best described as a maestro of towering, riveting Gesamtkunstwerke, which combine his own illustrations and animations with choral opera, theatre and dance.\u00a0Now, as he turns 70, he is having a moment even by his own prolific standards. Next month he will open A Natural History of the Studio at Hauser & Wirth\u2019s New York gallery, his first show with them in the city. There, he will show his nine-part film, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, which launched on streaming platform Mubi last year, and a series of sculptures and drawings that went into the film\u2019s creation. In June, he will open The Pull of Gravity at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, his first major sculpture presentation outside South Africa.Evidence of more forthcoming work is visible around his studio. On the ground floor, his team have assembled a miniature, true-to-life replica of the opera room at Glyndebourne in Sussex, where his production of Monteverdi\u2019s L\u2019Orfeo will play in 2026. \u201cWe always make a model big enough to see how the projections will look in the real thing,\u201d he says over the haunting contralto voice in Jordi Savall\u2019s arrangement. \u201cThe final piece will be the orchestra and the singers, the set, the projection. There\u2019s many layers to look at,\u201d he says of the production that has\u00a0been two years in the making.\u00a0Upstairs, in a Persian-carpeted room, two assistants are making digital edits to Kentridge and theatre director Lara Foot\u2019s reworking of a production of Faustus in Africa!, which will play at Edinburgh\u2019s International Festival. The original debuted in theatres in 1995, a year after South Africa threw off the shackles of apartheid, and used puppetry, animation and Goethe\u2019s Faust legend as a springboard to explore the contracts that ushered in post-colonial Africa. If the questions it poses (without giving answers) seem to translate to today\u2019s biggest issues, \u201cit\u2019s not that they\u2019re universal\u201d, Kentridge explains, \u201cit\u2019s that they\u2019re iterative \u2013 they come back\u201d.\u00a0Later that evening, Kentridge will board a flight to San Francisco to attend a showing of his chamber opera The Great Yes, The Great No. The piece fictionalises the wartime escape from Vichy France by cultural figures such as Andr\u00e9 Breton, Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss and Wifredo Lam.\u00a0Does he have any plans to slow down, I wonder, as dogs pad around the studio (only one, a cheerfully overweight chocolate Labrador, is his; the rest belong to the team of assistants). He replies: \u201cAny time I think I should stop, I get another idea\u2026\u201dKentridge was born in 1955, to Jewish lawyers who fought against apartheid; his father represented Nelson Mandela. His early years were steeped in politics. In the past he has talked\u00a0about the moment he went rifling through his father\u2019s\u00a0desk looking for sweets, and instead came across photographs of victims of the Sharpeville massacre, whose\u00a0families his father represented in the inquest. He has described it as \u201cone\u00a0of those moments when one\u2019s understanding of the world turns a sharp corner\u201d.\u00a0He studied politics and African studies at university before going on to the Johannesburg Art Foundation art school, and in 1975 began directing and acting in theatre productions. A stint in Paris to train as a mime was short-lived when he realised he would never be an actor. On his return to Johannesburg, he went into film production instead. \u201cI said to my wife that we would have our first child when I\u2019d made my first feature film,\u201d he says. \u201cLuckily, she didn\u2019t listen to me or we\u2019d still have no children. As it is, we have three children and no feature.\u201dHis \u201cthird life\u201d as an artist began in his late 20s. His series of charcoal-drawn animations, 9 Drawings for Projection, was first released in 1989 and swiftly gained him global recognition. Today his work is held in collections at the Tate Modern, MoMA and the Pompidou.\u00a0It was the period of incubation that came with the pandemic that gave rise to what will be seen at Hauser & Wirth. \u201cIt was fantastic to have so many months of no travel, of just being in the studio on my own,\u201d he says of Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, which finds Kentridge in conversation with himself. He explores the creative process in the studio while we watch the constant erasure and drawing-over of charcoal images that transform from one thing to another, a cup to a fish or a vase to a word. \u201cYou want to draw a masterpiece,\u201d he sighs during the\u00a0piece, in commiseration with himself, \u201cbut what you\u00a0end up drawing is\u2026 a coffee pot.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIt\u00a0was\u00a0about how to make sense of the world from inside\u00a0the\u00a0studio,\u201d he says today. \u201cVery much the studio as an enlarged\u00a0head, the thoughts in your head echoed in\u00a0the\u00a0movement around the studio.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWilliam\u2019s exploration of memory, history and the experience of the human body is especially powerful \u2013 and poignant \u2013 in a time of such precarity and uncertainty\u00a0in our world,\u201d says gallery owner Iwan Wirth.\u00a0\u201cHe brilliantly expresses both human vulnerability\u00a0and resilience, the impact of trauma and\u00a0the\u00a0possibility of hope.\u201d\u00a0At Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Pull of Gravity will engage more explicitly with politics. The show was conceived in the wake of the war in eastern Europe. \u201cIt was a few\u00a0weeks after the invasion of Ukraine and we were both\u00a0so full of this cataclysmic event,\u201d says Clare Lilley, the gallery\u2019s director. \u201cIt led to a centre point of the exhibition being about hubris.\u201d As such, there are sculptures of horses and bronzes, more than 3m tall, of striding figures with megaphones for heads.\u00a0Kentridge insists I stay for a cup of tea and slices of fresh mango. His staff gather for a break, and the gentle buzz of conversation starts up around the room. The chocolate Lab snoozes next to the table.Although his output is prolific, Kentridge questions his own sense of creative fulfilment. \u201cThe harder part of being an artist is that you need to have a gap, you need to\u00a0have a lack,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you\u2019re satisfied, if you\u2019re fine\u00a0as yourself, then you can just get on with your life.\u00a0You don\u2019t need to keep on making all these millions\u00a0of\u2026\u201d \u2013\u00a0he mimes scribbling the same rapid, sweeping strokes that appear in his animations, \u201cthat you\u00a0need other people to look at.\u201d\u00a0But he has allowed doubt to become part of his creative process. \u201cThe first idea you have when you\u2019re doing a project seems such a clear, good idea, and then as\u00a0you work on, it\u2019s not quite so good,\u201d Kentridge continues. He\u2019s talking about creativity itself, of course, but also the grand ideas of the 20th century. \u201cThen, you\u2019ve got a choice of either becoming more and more certain, and more and more strident, or else you can accept that it doesn\u2019t work and that you need to find new ideas from the cracks,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat is the push to make something that\u2019s beyond yourself, that remains when you step away from it?\u201d \u00a0A Natural History of the Studio is at Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York, from 1 May to 1 August. The Pull of\u00a0Gravity is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 28 June to 19\u00a0April 2026. Monica Mark is the FT\u2019s Southern Africa bureau chief\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The streets surrounding William Kentridge\u2019s home in northern Johannesburg are lined with trees of exorbitant beauty: jacaranda, blue gum and London planes arch overhead to form a luminous-green tunnel. The light in \u201cthe city of gold\u201d, as it is named for the reefs of\u00a0mineral<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":290676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-290675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290677,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290675\/revisions\/290677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}