From studio to screen, Kentridge's Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot redefines artistic collaboration

For more than four decades, William Kentridge has cultivated a protean artistic practice that defies easy categorisation. His work navigates between drawing, animation, theatre, opera and installation, creating a complex, layered world in which memory, history and identity intertwine.

Within this vast body of work, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (2025) stands out as both a culmination and an intimate archive — a book and film series that invites the reader and viewer into the artist’s studio, his mind and his collaborations.

The title itself — derived from a surreal image of Kentridge’s head replaced by a coffee pot — encapsulates the blend of humour, absurdity and self-reflection that permeates the project. As Kentridge revealed in a voice recording sent during the book’s production, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is about “not knowing exactly where the next page will lead, but trusting that something, in its own way, will connect”.

This openness to discovery mirrors the book’s fragmentary but rich texture, where philosophical musings, sketches, photographs and personal histories coexist without a rigid narrative.

One of the book’s powerful sequences is its reflection on political history through images of Stalin and the Soviet Politburo. Pages display archival photographs from the 1920s depicting 20 Politburo members standing in formal poses, gradually narrowing by the 1940s to only about five survivors of Stalin’s purges. This visual shrinking acts as a haunting metaphor for political violence and erasure.

Kentridge’s voice recording offers a personal take on this historical imagery: “I think it’s a good thing to have him playing with those heads. It’s an offering. This is what my sweetness has brought you. Which head would you like? A or B? This one or that one?”

His playful tone belies the gravity of the subject, turning political terror into a form of darkly comic dialogue that questions power’s capriciousness and history’s fragility.

Complementing these global histories, the book anchors itself firmly in Johannesburg, tracing Kentridge’s own urban geography. In an intimate moment captured on the page, Kentridge flips through annotated notebooks and diagrams, describing the journey “from the mining areas into the studio, from the studio to the art gallery”. He recalls the mine dumps — the “mountains of my childhood” — now largely removed, and locates his grandparents’ flat in Hillbrow just two blocks from the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

These geographic and familial signposts underscore the city’s layered presence, not merely as a backdrop, but as an active agent in Kentridge’s artistic narrative.

Cultural threads: the coat as status symbol

Embedded within the book’s complex layering is a poignant dialogue on tradition and status, brought to life through a conversation between Kentridge and vocalist, choreographer and composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu.

Mahlangu explains a Basotho expression: “When Basothos say ‘Please’, they say ‘I beg you with a stick and a jacket’.” Intrigued, Kentridge asks: “With a stick and a jacket?”

Mahlangu continues: “Because every time you get married, you have to buy a coat for your father-in-law, and the makoti [bride] does the same thing. And it gives status to men, because all the men who came from the war, those who survived, those who came back, and when the generals were given land and farms and goods packages, and the black men were given coats and bicycles, the coat became a status symbol, because nobody had a coat unless you were from the war.”

This brief yet profound exchange illustrates the way the book moves beyond autobiography to embrace oral histories, symbolic traditions and collective memory. The coat transcends its materiality to become a marker of survival, honour and social position — a motif that resonates across Kentridge’s explorations of identity, history and ritual.

The dualities of solitude and collaboration run like a sine wave throughout Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot — a theme Kentridge articulates with rare intimacy in his voice recording: “Sometimes there’s a great pleasure in working entirely on one’s own… And after a period of working on one’s own, there are projects which burst with the need to be talking in conversation, to have the energy of other people participating.”

Initially conceived during the first Covid-19 lockdown as a three-month solo project with a single assistant, Chris-Waldo de Wet, the series eventually spanned three years and expanded as more collaborators joined. De Wet served not only as cameraman, but also as sound recordist and editor, embodying the intimate, domestic production ethos of the project.

The book and film series acknowledge a constellation of long-time collaborators — composer Philip Miller, costume designer Greta Goiris, set designer Sabine Theunissen, dancer Dada Masilo and others — whose voices and presence enrich the series. As Kentridge explains: “Nothing is ever made alone. Even the most private drawing carries the memory of conversations, of other people’s rhythms and mistakes.”

Form and medium: a new kind of viewing

Originally, the filmed series was envisioned as nine 50-minute episodes. However, feedback from early viewers led to a shift towards more concise, 15- to 30-minute episodes designed for streaming platforms such as Mubi.

Kentridge recalls: “At first, they were going to be nine 50-minute episodes. When I made them 50 minutes, people said that’s fine, but that’s for the eight people in the studio who are going to enjoy watching themselves like a home movie.

“If you want more people to watch it, you have to be a little more stern with what’s in and what’s out.”

This adjustment reflects the evolving landscape of cinematic consumption, where viewers demand flexible pacing and intimacy over the spectacle of traditional cinema. The series’ success on Mubi — finding audiences not only in South Africa and Europe, but surprisingly large viewerships in Brazil and Mexico — underscores its global resonance.

In exhibition contexts, the work is presented with studio objects and drawings to evoke the artist’s creative environment. At the 2024 Venice Biennale, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev emphasised this domestic intimacy, insisting the films be shown “not on a big screen, but as if you were watching at home”. This curatorial choice preserves the sense of proximity and immediacy fundamental to the project.

Transformation is a leitmotif throughout Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot. Kentridge reflects on animation as a metaphor for constant flux: “Each frame is only provisional. The drawing is going to become something else.”

Episodes like Vanishing Points and Metamorphosis resonate with both personal and pandemic-related themes of disappearance and renewal. The act of creation itself becomes an act of resilience, a “defensive optimism” that confronts the often harsh realities of the world with determination and hope.

Kentridge reflects: “For every good thing happening, there are other disasters. If one only sees the disasters, one misses a lot of the extraordinary impetuses and initiatives and work and feelings and spirit that are present.”

This blend of realism and hope anchors the book and film series as a testimony to perseverance through uncertainty.

Despite its deeply personal nature, the series is threaded with intergenerational memory and collective history. Kentridge’s elderly father — who was 98 at the project’s start and is now 103 — appears in drawings, and his granddaughter Ida, born shortly after filming began, is present as a toddler. This bookending of life stages connects personal biography to larger cycles of time and history.

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is not merely a retrospective but a living, breathing archive. The book, together with the film series, stands as an open-ended project — fragmented, expansive and resonant.

Kentridge acknowledges the work’s dual existence on screen and in print, inviting readers to move fluidly between mediums: “Hopefully, people looking through the book will be tempted to say, let me track it down on Mubi, [or] wherever else it’s been shown, and see it.”

The project’s success lies in its ability to be both intensely intimate and widely inclusive, a space where history, memory, collaboration and creative impulse converge. It is a profound contribution to contemporary art and an intimate glimpse into the studio and mind of one of the most significant artists of our time. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.