About the work

William Kentridge has created a new silkscreen print on found pages exclusively for Whitechapel Gallery on the occasion of its 125th Anniversary. 

The edition is one of the artist’s ongoing series of text drawings or Rubrics which feature text printed onto individual found pages, making each work subtly different. Kentridge often uses repositories of information like dictionaries or encyclopaedias as the background for his prints and drawings. In this case, the words ‘Poetry is Elsewhere’ are printed onto pages of the book Stellar Parallax: Formation and Solution of Normal Equations (11), Royal Observatory, Cape Town, 1946 - a book used to record the shifts in the position of stars in the night skies of South Africa.

The title ‘Poetry is Elsewhere’ is one of many enigmatic phrases that Kentridge has included in his Rubrics series. For Kentridge the charm of these phrases is their elusive meaning and the riddles that they pose.  

About the artist

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg) is renowned for his animated expressionist drawings and films exploring time, the history of colonialism and the aspirations and failures of revolutionary politics. Kentridge grew up in South Africa witnessing the end of apartheid, and South African society and politics are recurring themes which appear throughout his body of work. 

Selected Exhibitions

Kentridge’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2003, 2012), Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy (1993, 1999, 2003, 2015), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998, 2010), the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2010), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2016) and Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022).