At Kunsthalle Praha, the South African artist’s expansive new exhibition embraces contradiction, memory, and the productive space of not knowing.
William Kentridge has long insisted on the value of uncertainty. In ‘The Battle Between YES and NO’, opening at Kunsthalle Praha, this commitment unfolds across a sprawling exhibition that resists chronology in favour of association, tension, and overlap. Bringing together early charcoal animations, theatrical installations, and recent film works, the exhibition offers a dense and immersive encounter with one of the most influential artistic practices of the past four decades.
Three chanel video installation still of ‘To Cross One More Sea’, (2024). Credit William Kentridge.
Kentridge’s work has consistently navigated the unstable terrain between personal memory and political history. Born in Johannesburg during apartheid, he developed a visual language in dialogue with South Africa’s fractured realities, yet it has always extended beyond them. Questions of power, migration, responsibility, and the limits of knowledge circulate throughout his films and installations, where erasure and revision are not simply aesthetic strategies but ethical positions.
In Prague, these concerns find a new resonance through an explicit engagement with Franz Kafka. The newly commissioned ‘A Letter to Felice’ anchors the exhibition, drawing on fragments from Kafka’s letters, diaries, and fiction to construct a layered, six-act work that culminates in a silent film. Here, Kentridge himself appears masked as Kafka, collapsing historical distance while invoking the writer’s enduring preoccupation with alienation and bureaucratic absurdity.
Three chanel video installation still ‘To Cross One More Sea’ (2024). Credit William Kentridge.
The exhibition’s title points to a foundational gesture in Kentridge’s practice: the merging of opposites. Early works that combine “Yes” and “No” into “Noise” signal a refusal of binary thinking, instead embracing contradiction as a generative force. This approach carries through to the exhibition’s spatial logic, where works from different periods and contexts are placed in dialogue with one another. Films from the Drawings for Projection series sit alongside installations such as O Sentimental Machine and Right into Her Arms, creating a field of shifting meanings rather than a fixed narrative.
Recent works, including To Cross One More Sea, extend this inquiry into migration and exile, drawing on texts from Caribbean intellectual histories. Meanwhile, the presence of projects linked to The Centre for the Less Good Idea underscores Kentridge’s ongoing investment in collaboration and experimentation as modes of thinking through complexity.
Throughout, the studio emerges as both subject and method, a site where uncertainty is neither resolved nor resolved. In Prague, a city deeply marked by Kafka’s legacy, Kentridge’s insistence on ambiguity feels particularly acute. Rather than offering clarity, ‘The Battle Between YES and NO’ proposes a different kind of knowledge, one grounded in hesitation, contradiction, and the unfinished.
This exhibition will be on view at Kunsthalle Praha in Prague until 7 September 2026.
