Taking over one of Bozar’s major exhibition circuits of ten galleries, Kentridge also creates site-specific works for the occasion, such as the monumental Ubu wall drawing or the tribute to the late South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo (on Bozar’s stairs).
September also marks the start of a wider collaboration: William Kentridge is Bozar’s first Grand Invité. Throughout the ‘26-‘27 season, his work and ideas resonate across the Centre for Fine Arts through his exhibition, but also performances, concerts, talks and collaborations with a new generation of artists. The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an artistic workshop co-founded by Bronwyn Lace and William Kentridge in 2016 in Johannesburg, will be at the heart of this creative effervescence.
Political and poetic transformation
William Kentridge began his artistic career at the height of the political struggle against the apartheid regime in his native South Africa. His work bears witness to a profound commitment – at once social, political and poetic – that continues to shape his artistic practice to this day. Firmly rooted in the history of South Africa, it opens onto broader reflections on human history, its contradictions, recurring violence and capacity for transformation.
Over more than four decades, Kentridge has developed an artistic language in which images, ideas and forms are continuously set in motion. Drawing becomes animation; animation enters an installation or migrates onto the stage; images and objects reappear in new configurations. This constant transformation and shape-shifting across media has become one of the defining characteristics of his practice.
William Kentridge observes: “I make drawings and sometimes the drawings are filmed and become animated films. Sometimes there are performers in front of the animated film and they become theatre or opera. So it becomes a drawing in four dimensions.”
“The world itself is irrational”
The absurd also provides Kentridge with a way of confronting political and historical realities that resist straightforward explanation.
William Kentridge notes: “The absurd is, in a way, a form of realism. When the world itself is irrational, describing it in purely rational terms can be misleading. Absurdity follows flawed logic to its extreme conclusions, revealing the underlying contradictions.”
From his early engagement with Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi to his exploration of Gogol’s The Nose, absurdity exposes the contradictions underlying apparently rational systems.
The central role of the artist's studio
At the centre of Kentridge’s practice is his Johannesburg studio, which the exhibition at Bozar evokes both spatially and conceptually. It is a place of drawing and experimentation, but also of rehearsals, editing, fabrication and design. “At the centre is still the drawing space, which remains a solitary activity” says Kentridge “Beyond that, the work is deeply collaborative, artistically and conceptually.”
As shown in the exhibition, from the individual starting point of Kentridge’s drawings, the work expands into a collaborative process involving actors, musicians, singers, designers, visual artists, editors and technicians.
I am not me, the horse is not mine translates this movement between studio, stage and exhibition space into a substantial journey through Kentridge’s oeuvre. The exhibition starts and ends with spaces evoking his studio. Between them, works produced during the creation of several major stage productions unfold in a deliberately non-chronological sequence.
Rather than a conventional retrospective, curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh has conceived the exhibition as a musical score in several movements, inspired by the hybrid forms, shifts of rhythm and compositional structures of Kentridge’s stage productions.
“This exhibition unfolds as a musical composition” Abou El Fetouh explains, “weaving together William Kentridge’s drawings, animations, and stage works into a dynamic, non-linear journey”. He adds: “The boundaries between mediums dissolve, histories intertwine, inviting us to experience art as inquiry, memory, and poetic possibility.”
Brussels: a relationship spanning three decades
For Kentridge, Brussels is far from unfamiliar territory. His relationship with the city stretches back more than thirty years, and Brussels has witnessed the genesis, early touring and premieres of several of his productions. In 1995, the city hosted the premiere of his now legendary Faustus in Africa!. Three years later, in 1998, Bozar presented Kentridge’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe.
His return in 2026 therefore carries particular resonance: I am not me, the horse is not mine continues – and reassembles – a longstanding artistic relationship.
The exhibition is a co-production of Bozar and ΕΜΣΤ, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens where it will be presented from June until December 2027.
Support: Ministry Foreign Affaires / Uhoda
William Kentridge : Bozar's first Grand Invité
With the '26–'27 season, Bozar launches the Grand Invité: each season, an artist is invited to enter into an extended dialogue with the institution, developing projects across disciplines and across Bozar’s artistic programme. William Kentridge inaugurates this new format, in collaboration with The Centre for the Less Good Idea.
Christophe Slagmuylder, CEO & Artistic Director of Bozar, explains: “Welcoming William Kentridge as Bozar’s first Grand Invité is both an honour and a natural choice. He is a major, multifaceted artist and a tireless explorer who continually reinvents his artistic practice. His deep connection to Brussels lends this invitation a particularly personal and meaningful dimension.”
Kentridge’s presence resonates with the motto of Bozar’s new season, “Reassembling”: putting things back together, but also coming together again. At a moment marked by war, propaganda and increasingly closed worldviews, Bozar proposes the open space of music, images, performances and stories as a place to experience art collectively and imagine different worlds.
Zoë Gray, Director of Exhibitions at Bozar, points out that “Kentridge’s work enables us to see how history repeats itself, how human folly remains persistently stubborn across time and around the world. But Kentridge does so with optimism, with nuance, with a fascination for utopian visions and with faith in human resilience and creativity in the face of oppression."
“This exhibition unfolds as a musical composition, weaving together William Kentridge’s drawings, animations, and stage works into a dynamic, non-linear journey. In this exhibition, the boundaries between mediums dissolve, histories intertwine, inviting us to experience art as inquiry, memory, and poetic possibility.”
“Welcoming William Kentridge as Bozar’s first Grand Invité is both an honour and a natural choice. He is both a major multifaceted artist – in the visual and musical fields – celebrated around the world, and a tireless explorer who, from his studio, continually reinvents and reopens his artistic practice to a wide range of disciplines.
His deep connection to Brussels, a city where he has embarked on some of his most remarkable musical adventures, lends this invitation a particularly personal and meaningful dimension. This season at Bozar offers a unique opportunity to discover the many facets of a hyper-creative and, above all, deeply human individual.”
“William Kentridge appears to have the ability to travel through time, and - perhaps even better - to take us with him! His remarkable works take stories from one era and move them to another, or transpose them from one cultural context to another, adding an improbable yet totally coherent cast of characters along the way. In doing so, he enables us to see how history repeats itself, how human folly remains persistently stubborn across time and around the world. But he does so with optimism, with nuance, with a fascination for utopian visions and with faith in human resilience and creativity in the face of oppression.”
Tarek Abou El Fetouh is an independent curator based in Brussels. He curated numerous exhibitions, including the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale (2024); A Shadow of a shadow, a solo exhibition of William Kentridge in Sharjah (2004); the Public Art Program for Expo 2020 in Dubai; Rituals of Signs and Metamorphoses (2018) and Captive of Love (2017) at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing; The Time Is Out of Joint at the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2016); Lest the Two Seas Meet at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2015); and the exhibition of Home Works 6 in Beirut (2013).
Abou El Fetouh established visual and performance art initiatives across the Arab world, including the Meeting Points Contemporary Art Festival, which took place in Brussels and different Arab cities. He recently initiated the multi-city project Made with your Magic, in different chapters with exhibitions in Tunis for the Dream City festival in Oct 2025, and in Beirut in July 2026 at Beirut Art Center. The project unfolds with exhibitions in Damascus, Jeddah, and Baghdad in 2026 and 2027. Abou El Fetouh was Senior Curator and Director of the Performance Department at the Sharjah Art Foundation between 2021 and 2024.
Image credits: Tarek Abou El Fetouh at the opening of Meeting Points 7 at M HKA - Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. Courtesy of M HKA - Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp and Mophradat. Photo by Bram Goots
