Surreal, macabre, and captivating – William Kentridge’s early drawings immediately take you into a distinctive world.

In this charcoal triptych, in a crowded room filled with men in evening-wear, a human figure is laid out across a table as another man cuts a grotesque pattern onto his skin. The drawing references the sinister and covert operations of the South West African Police Counter-Insurgency Unit, known as Koevoet (Afrikaans for Crowbar), active during the final ten years of the South African Border War (1966–89). Having grown up in Johannesburg under apartheid, Kentridge’s early work often bears witness to this dark period in South Africa’s history.

In 1989, while making the film Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, Kentridge landed on an animation technique that’s been a central part of his practice ever since. As he describes it: “A drawing is started on the paper, I walk across to the camera, shoot one or two frames, walk back to the paper, change the drawing (slightly), walk back to the camera, walk back to the paper, to the camera, and so on.”

Putting erasure and metamorphosis at the centre of each story, the technique is well-suited to Kentridge’s ongoing interest in the instability of history and memory. In Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris we meet some of the key characters in Kentridge’s world, including Soho Eckstein, an invented, semi-autobiographical property tycoon. For Kentridge, Soho’s fraught relationship with the city acknowledges the anxieties he himself wrestles with as an artist who has spent his career depicting Johannesburg.

Drawings from all 11 of Kentridge’s short animated films are now on display in our galleries, in a Summer Exhibition-style salon hang, allowing a close-up encounter with the individual frames of the animations.

If you want to understand Kentridge’s universe, Ubu is a figure you need to know. He’s a metamorphosing character who often becomes a camera determined to film everything and destroy any witnesses contradicting his stories. For our exhibition, Kentridge has drawn Ubu directly onto the walls of our galleries!

The film Ubu Tells the Truth was made with Kentridge’s signature technique of gradually transforming drawings. In part, it explores South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a large-scale enquiry established in 1995 to examine abuses against citizens under apartheid. The Commission travelled across the country, setting up in public spaces to hear from locals – a format that Kentridge has called a kind of theatre. People could come forward to tell their truths as survivors, but also as perpetrators whose honesty could grant them exemption from punishment.

Kentridge said of the process: “As people give more and more evidence of the things they have done, they get closer and closer to amnesty, and it becomes more and more intolerable that these people should be given it.”

Set inside a miniature wooden theatre run by motors and wheels – something between a puppet show and a mechanical theatre – Black Box / Chambre Noire solidified Kentridge’s interest in entwining opera, art, theatre and film within immersive, ambitious productions.

The work examines Germany’s colonial force and genocide in South West Africa (now Namibia) at the start of the 20th century. In attempting to re-tell the historical events, the production unravels concepts of past, present, victim, perpetrator, theatre and spectator.

Like much of his work, Black Box / Chambre Noire is staunchly analogue, a very physical process and presence. At the RA, you can gather round the wooden contraption and watch mechanically operated figures (including a coffee pot, a megaphone, a bicycle rider) come to life and perform on their delicate, distorted stage.

Reassuring for anyone who talks to themself at work, or who returns to whatever they created yesterday with a furrowed brow, Drawing Lessons are Kentridge’s conversations with himself in the studio.

The body of work explores art-making through history – from Plato’s cave of shadows to his own practice. Witty and slightly disconcerting, taking inspiration from Dada films and slapstick American comedy such as the Marx brothers, the films are also deeply interested in how meaning is made.

Begun in 2010, the ongoing series of Drawing Lessons are “collages of thought” which lent their name to a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in 2012, with all the additional flourishes you can expect from a Kentridge production.

Kentridge says: “Drawing Lessons are all attempts to explore the multiple selves that we have, and to interrogate oneself. In the studio it’s very easy: you can see yourself as the person, you’re the person busy making the drawing – that’s one person, that’s one subject. And then you step back and look at the drawing, and you think ‘look at what that stupid idiot drew’. So you split into two.”

In the three-channel film Notes Towards a Model Opera, an African ballerina en pointe dances with a rifle slung over her shoulder, semi- automatic pistols in her hands, red sashes attached to her pistols, red cap on her head, against a mobile setting of maps (China, Africa, South Polar Regions), while in the background the Internationale plays in various languages.

When making this film, Kentridge’s starting point was Maoist China’s operas: familiar cultural stories re-worked to include inspiring figures rousing support for the revolution. The operas were the brainchild of Jiang Qing (Madam Mao) and were the only allowed forms of music, opera and film.

Captivated by the flag-waving, passionate songs, speeches, dances, and reliable defeat of enemies, Kentridge assembled a team of collaborators who could create their own version of such a production – including choreographer Dada Masilo, composer Philip Miller, and a pan-African ensemble of performers. The resulting film is a dizzyingly fast-paced explosion of motion and sound – Kentridge says that “We set all in motion. An incoherent hullabaloo.”

Sibyl takes inspiration partly from the Ancient Greek and Roman prophetesses, known by this name. In Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, Sibyl’s story goes that people would come to her cave with questions about their fate, and she would leave each answer written on an oak leaf in a pile in front of the cave. When people returned to retrieve their oak leaf, a breeze would blow up and swirl the leaves about, so that you never knew if you were getting your fate or someone else’s.

Based on Kentridge’s 2019 chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl, which premiered at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome in 2019, Sibyl is a short film made using Kentridge’s signature animation technique. To stage the film at the RA, Kentridge collaborated with designer Sabine Theunissen, who used original props and costumes from the stage production, along with puppets and costumes made by Greta Goiris, to create a theatrical installation in our galleries – take a look below.

Created in the 1990s, Colonial Landscapes is a series of huge black charcoal drawings in extraordinary detail, punctuated by red pastel marks hinting at some sort of interference. The landscapes are based on a late-19th-century British publication, Africa and its Explorations, as told by its Explorers, full of photogravures of landscapes across the continent for a European audience enthralled by scenes of distant lands. But these were images of cultural superiority; European powers including Germany, France, Great Britain and Belgium had seized control of many African countries and indigenous inhabitants subjugated and natural resources appropriated.

Kentridge’s images of waterfalls and landscapes mimic colonial representations of Africa but lines, posts, and other marks disrupt the idyllic scenes and suggest processes of surveying and mapping as Europeans attempt to possess and control the landscape. He says “Initially I just wanted to draw landscapes, then I realised that the drawings, in themselves, evoked these larger questions.”

“Is it possible to tell a story without telling it through the story of one individual – the girl, the soldier, the hero, standing in for the whole war?”

Kentridge is interested in “understanding history as fragmented”. This immense production marked 100 years since the end of the First World War with an engrossing, fervent chorus of fragments brought to life through dance, projected images, speech, song, pantomime, shadow play, and music.

In contrast to many commemorations, The Head & the Load, originally staged at Tate Modern, focused on the rarely discussed experiences of the two million African people used as porters and carriers by the British, French, and German forces who were fighting through their colonised lands and people across Africa. Their contributions to the war were erased from history and historical accounts. With scant historical records, Kentridge and his collaborators work towards what he calls a “provisional understanding of the past”.

In 2001 Kentridge began making tapestries in collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio. Raw mohair from Angora goats farmed in the Eastern Cape is carded, spun and dyed to the colours needed for each tapestry in Eswatini before being transferred to the looms at the studio in Diepsloot, on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

Preparatory drawings are adapted, annotated and set behind the vertical strings that form the skeleton of the tapestry. Teams of up to five skilled weavers work at each loom, translating the intricate design into the new medium – these can take up to eight months to complete.

Carte Hypsométrique de l’Empire Russe, the largest tapestry made by Kentridge and the Stephens Tapestry Studio to date, was specially made for this gallery. The central image of the boat is based on a drawing, Migrants and Prisoners, that Kentridge conceived for a monumental frieze Triumphs and Laments created on the banks of the Tiber in Rome in 2016. The image of the perilous journeys migrants undertake serves as a reminder of the terrible challenges that continue to confront the world we live in.

This autumn, William Kentridge stages his biggest UK exhibition, in a show spanning his 40-year career.

Visitors will find four-metre wide tapestries, his signature charcoal trees and flowers, and the breathtaking three-screen film, Notes Towards a Model Opera. Many pieces have never been seen before, and some have been made specially for our show and galleries.