WILLIAM KENTRIDGE INSTALLATION

Artist: William Kentridge
Title: The Refusal of Time 
Place: Metropolitan Museum of Art 

William Kentridge is a South African artist whose works incorporates science, globalization, colonialism and memory. In this installation, "The Refusal of Time," it is a thirty minute animation that explores the various historical ideas of time with the inspiration from Albert Einstein's hypothesis of railway stations not operating exactly on schedule. 

I really enjoyed this installation and the way time and space were shown on another level, almost 4-dimensional in a way. I was instantly intrigued as I walked in the room because of the darkness and the  surrounding of screens around me that were showing something that looked like a galaxy.  The space gave off a very "industrial" like feeling which was pretty interesting and especially with the wooden machine in the middle, it really made me feel like I was in a factory of some sort.

I really liked how Kentridge focused on the theme of "colonialism and industry" which was emphasized in the beginning where a group of people "walked" slowly across the screens with old tools. The motion of the people walking slowly and the viewing of people of different ages demonstrated hard work and labor. It brought us back in time in a visual appealing way and it was almost as if we were stuck in time as people kept on "walking" across the screens. It was almost as if it was a GIF, something that kept on repeating. 

Kentridge experimented a lot with sounds which also gave us a sense of time. The sounds almost sounded as if it were being looped but at different intervals of time, such as the viewing of the metronome. There were five metronomes showing on the screens around me, but each one was ticking at a different time, which also changed the way the metronome was ticking. It was almost as if it was an optical illusion.

I enjoyed the way Kentridge took different scenarios and portrayed it in ways where it involved different motions, repetition, sequence and sounds. He almost made some scenarios comical such as the scenes where the man kept getting on and off the chair. I also found it interesting how the wooden structure in the middle conveyed a sense of "linear time" by the constant sound of ticking, while the scenes that were shown on the walls conveyed a sense of "non-linear time" because of the various sequences.  Overall, I think this exhibition showed time and space in a very unique way!