William Kentridge is bringing his new sound and projection installation, You Whom I Could Not Save, to Palermo. The South African artist’s solo exhibition of the same name will be open to the public from October 8, 2023 to January 12, 2024 at Palazzo Branciforte, where the titular work will be presented along with 16 previously unexhibited drawings. Also on show will be the video work Sibyl (2020), a group of bronze and painted-bronze sculptures and a tapestry sequence. The project, created uniquely for Palermo and opening on the 19th Giornata del Contemporaneo, has been has been overseen by ruber.contemporanea with the support of Fondazione Sicilia and the coordination of Sicily Art and Culture. From an idea by Antonio Leone, artistic director of ruber.contemporanea, it has been curated by art historians Giulia Ingarao and Alessandra Buccheri.

The sound and projection installation You Whom I Could Not Save will be installed in the heart of the evocatively Piranesian architecture of the Santa Rosalia Pawnbrokerage in Palazzo Branciforte, alongside the 2020 video work Sibyl. The space’s maze-like pathways will resonate with music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and conducted by Tlale Makhene, as relayed through 8 large megaphones: a sonic weaving of texts in languages of the Nguni family, comprising isiZulu, siSwati, isiXhosa and Xitsonga. “The starting point of the Palermo exhibition,” Kentridge explains, “was the idea of a sound piece. In the room in which you see the projection, we’ll have the seven voices, so you can move between them and hear them and hear the whole piece. And in the other rooms there’ll be echoes and fragments pulling you into the final room. The architecture and the echoes of the space seemed to fit with it because a lot of the clothes that ended up in the pawnbrokers of the Monte dei Pegni di Santa Rosalia were there so that people could make the journey from Sicily to the United States.”

At the same time, several bronze and painted-bronze sculptures and a tapestry sequence will nestle among the brokerage’s wooden shelving, forming ephemeral stage sets. The show will also feature 16 previously unexhibited drawings: palimpsestic pages in which charcoal-rendered figures dance in apparently ritual procession, calling to mind the transience of existence. Formed from hybrid near-Surrealist silhouettes and collages of geometric shapes inscribed with faces that recur throughout the artist’s work, these characters proceed into a world where – to use the Mayakovskian phrase that appears in You Whom I Could Not Save – ‘misfortune flows as from a water main’. The question of our future remains as constant in Kentridge’s work as our need for hope, while the answer seems to find its sense in the magic of images and sounds that the artist composes. His extraordinary constructions of figures and words invite us to immerse ourselves in heavenly depths that will enclose and embrace us, even if they cannot save us all.