Reassembling. Putting the world back together. 

William Kentridge has chosen collage to reassemble the broken pieces into something new. Cutting and pasting was a favourite strategy among the historical avant-garde. Costumes, masks and dancers blend into hybrid creatures: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, along with Shostakovich, as well as the poets Brik and Mayakovsky, appear as puppets who literally dance to a different tune. Kentridge filmed them in his studio, in front of a green screen. We have chosen images from those recordings as a visual theme for this season’s brochure. We find ourselves right in the middle of the creative process, in the artist’s studio: a place to retreat to, for writing or drawing, but also a place where you can invite others to join you in making art. 

Reassembling. Coming back together. In ever-changing constellations. 

William Kentridge is our first Grand Invité. Every season, we invite an artist to help shape the programme: with an exhibition, but also by working with a new generation of artists. Kentridge is doing this with The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an artistic workshop in Johannesburg focused on the creative process. Kentridge’s artistic practice covers several disciplines at once, using media that he constantly reinvents and with involvement in all kinds of collaborative processes. A work of art often begins with a clear idea, until the cracks begin to appear. The places where this happens – the less good ideas – are precisely the areas where new possibilities emerge. Collaboration, experiment and play lead to unexpected insights. 

Bozar counters the closed world views of war, propaganda and economic power with the open space of music, images and stories. It offers ‘productions’ – in the double sense of presentations and creations – in which reality is not set eternally in stone but broken open. 

In her sculptures, Rachel Whiteread makes the space surrounding everyday objects tangible – varying in scale from a house, room or staircase to a mattress, chair or hot water bottle – and reveals the intimate traces of human lives. Emptiness and fullness swap places: the familiar domestic universe regains its strangeness, as a world to be rediscovered. ‘Everything is so full that I’m trying to empty it’, the artist says. Emptying it to make space for meaning, dialogue and new connections. 

This season, Bozar is also devoting a portrait to the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, with a cross-section of her work. METACOSMOS (2017) confirms her position as one of the most unique voices in contemporary music, inviting us to ‘go to the other side and come out somewhere you’ve never been before and that you have no control over.’ 

An arts centre is like a big collage of ideas and talents, views and voices. It brings together, makes new connections and opens up space for free associations. 

Reassembling. Daring to imagine the world differently. Differently – and hopefully better. 

‘With an iron fist, we will drive humanity to happiness!’ This Bolshevik slogan, which Kentridge quotes in his film, reminds us that once a utopia presents itself as real and omnipresent, its dark side threatens to emerge. Longing for a different world, continuing to believe in it and dreaming of it out loud together – this is what makes us human.  

Reassembling. 
Continuing to believe in another world with an ‘Oh’ for wonder: free, vulnerable and in solidarity. 

Christophe Slagmuylder, CEO & Artistic Director Bozar