South African artist William Kentridge is celebrating his 70th birthday with a comprehensive retrospective spanning two major German cultural institutions. The Folkwang Museum in Essen and the Dresden State Art Collections are honoring the internationally acclaimed artist's five-decade career with exhibitions titled "Listen to the Echo," showcasing approximately 160 works that demonstrate his unique approach to addressing humanity's greatest themes through art.

Perhaps it's a fundamental misconception that art must be as close as possible to daily life to be effective. Distance might actually be the more powerful catalyst, even the only truly suitable accelerant that reliably ignites both mind and heart, rather than the sticky, servile proximity to audiences, everyday life, and personal experiences. Fifteen years ago, Kentridge appeared at the wandering Theater der Welt festival in the Ruhr region with a puppet performance of Claudio Monteverdi's early Baroque opera "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria," staged with rod puppets from Cape Town's Handspring Puppet Company.

The puppet performance was backed by films created using archaic methods, with every single frame of his clips hand-drawn in charcoal or pastel colors. The singing actors moved the rod puppets themselves without any direct contact with the audience, creating an evening of maximum artificiality and pure theatrical magic that was both touching and moving. Now Kentridge has returned to the Ruhr region with the first stop of four exhibitions reviewing his universal body of work on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

Kentridge's artistic practice found its major themes early and seems both ahead of its time and completely removed from it. His work has consistently refused all fashions and, despite its decisive political engagement, has never strayed into the shallows of noisy, self-righteous activism. Born as a privileged white South African with Lithuanian-Jewish roots under the apartheid regime, Kentridge grew up in a family of prominent lawyers who represented figures including former South African President Nelson Mandela.

After studying politics and African studies in South Africa and Europe, Kentridge developed an artistic practice that reflects his origins. To this day, his work revolves around racism, exploitation and injustice, the mechanisms of repressive systems, flight, guilt and forgiveness, humanity and community. In short, he addresses the great themes of humanity and their echo chambers in art, always working with references to art history through his own masterful drawing skills, as well as connections to the history of moving images, comics, and theatrical arts that maintain the illuminating distance of the proscenium stage through alienation effects.

One of the aesthetic trademarks of Kentridge's work is the sound funnel on a tripod, sometimes serving as a megaphone, sometimes as a gramophone horn, sometimes as a sound amplifier, sometimes as a listening device. "Listen to the Echo" is the title that unites the western and eastern parts of Germany in this mega-exhibition, which begins at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Around 160 exhibits from five decades span his entire oeuvre, with the selection of works deliberately referencing the history of the exhibition locations.

Essen, like Johannesburg, is a former mining city - coal in Germany, gold in South Africa. There's also a connection point for Kentridge's lifelong theme of confronting colonial history in Essen, as it was the Essen-based Baedeker publishing house that once published the yearbook on German colonies. The comprehensive Essen exhibition represents all genres of Kentridge's broad practice: drawings, animated films, prints, sculptures, tapestries, and multi-channel film installations.

His films uniquely mix elements of feature films, documentaries, and experimental cinema, but black-and-white drawing always remains the foundation of his art. In his film works, virtuosically deployed soundtracks with suggestively used music play a crucial role. Among the works on display are four films from the "Drawings for Projection" series, created between 1991 and 2020, which link South Africa's present and past, including the rise and fall of Johannesburg, which experienced a similar boom to the Ruhr region after gold discoveries in the late 19th century.

Each animated sequence is based on a charcoal drawing that Kentridge captures with the camera. He then changes the drawing and the next shot is created, followed by further changes through addition or deletion, with the previous state partially remaining visible, like a shadow or echo of the past state. The films develop their own poetic language that oscillates between melancholy and quiet comedy while not shying away from the grotesque.

Impressive is the large hall titled "Porter" with 15 tapestries showing expressive black silhouette figures against the background of historical European maps from the 19th century. The arrangement illustrates Kentridge's collaborative working method, showing the artist's comparatively tiny template with torn paper alongside the huge tapestries on the wall, which were made by hand transfer on large looms in a workshop near Johannesburg. The hall owes its title "Porter" to the people depicted, who carry and pull loads - meaningful images for migration movements.

Of almost tormenting urgency is "Black Box/Chambre Noire," a work that commemorates the suppression of the Herero and Nama uprising in 1904 in German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. The mechanical figure theater on a kind of tiny fairground stage contrasts historical testimonies of this genocide with Kentridge's drawings and animations. Meanwhile, Sarastro's aria from Mozart's "The Magic Flute" plays, sung balsamically - an icon of Enlightenment utopia: "In these sacred halls, revenge is unknown." It gets under the skin.

In Dresden, the Kentridge exhibition is distributed across three museums: the Albertinum focuses on two film installations, the Kupferstich-Kabinett in the Residenzschloss contrasts Kentridge's printmaking work with historical engravings by Albrecht Dürer and Francisco de Goya, among others. In the puppet theater collection at Kraftwerk Mitte, Johannesburg's Centre for the Less Good Idea has developed an exhibition that brings Kentridge's puppet universe into dialogue with the collection's historical objects.

The common thread of the Dresden exhibitions is the phenomenon of procession, from parades to marches to demonstrations. Processions play an important role both in Kentridge's work and in the city of Dresden. Every Dresden tourist is led past the monumental Fürstenzug near the Frauenkirche, which consists of 23,000 tiles of Meissen porcelain and shows the ancestral gallery of Saxon margraves, dukes, electors, and kings.

Wilhelm Walter's scale drawings of this world's largest porcelain mural now face two monumental film installations by Kentridge in the exhibition: "More Sweetly Play the Dance" from 2015 and "Oh to Believe in Another World" from 2022, each lasting about 15 minutes. The first shows a procession of shadow figures to the sounds of a brass band, whose dancing skeletons recall medieval dances of death. The second is a visual echo of Dmitri Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, considered a barely disguised settling of scores between the composer and Stalin.

Kentridge, in turn, references not only the oppressive pull of history in a breathtaking mix of means from historical film snippets to bizarre puppet theater. He also draws attention to the composer's Janus-faced ambivalence, who came to terms with the regime under which he suffered, and his shimmering attitude between affirmation and criticism that remains unresolved. It's an overwhelming work, subtly and highly musically composed. The journey is worth it for this alone.