William Kentridge argues with himself in streaming series

At the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, people around the world were stuck alone (and with themselves) as they pondered difficult existential questions. In his studio in Johannesburg, South African artist William Kentridge went one step further: he made a film series in which two versions of Kentridge discuss philosophical topics and discuss misremembered childhood events. Sometimes a third Kentridge comes along to play peacemaker or explain something to the camera.

Made over the span of two years and now streaming on Mubi, the nine episodes Self-portrait as a coffee pot (2022) combines humor and seriousness through dialogue (and monologue), animation, drawing, music and performance. A Dada-esque love letter to the studio and art-making, the series is wonderfully optimistic. It’s also exactly what you’d expect from Kentridge during lockdown.

Kentridge has described Self-portrait as “intended as a polemical experience about a way of working, a confidence to give an image the benefit of the doubt, and see what emerges”. In each 30-minute episode, the artist takes audiences through his sometimes complicated art-making process – from charcoal drawings to torn and reconstructed pieces of paper, giant shadow puppets and wall projections – all while using his signature draw-and-eraser artwork. stop motion animation style. Drawings change and transform on the studio walls as Kentridge walks around thinking (“productive procrastination,” he calls it), always dressed in his familiar uniform of a white shirt and black pants.

At night, while Kentridge is supposedly sleeping, mice made of crumpled paper run past his desk and play the piano, while an old tuba dances with an equally old video camera. Even during the day, the series features dancing: Kentridge dances with an animated drawing of a skeleton or with his other self, and visits with dancers the artist invites to his studio in later episodes (as the pandemic subsides).

As always with Kentridge, music also plays a major role. Part of an episode is dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (Kentridge staged his opera The nose for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2010). And at the end of the series, when all the Kentridges, studio assistants and invited actors, dancers and performers leave the confines of the studio for the first time, it is a marching band that leads them out into the street.

While the mood of Self-portrait is generally optimistic, the shadow of Covid looming, with data on the number of deaths in Johannesburg appearing fleetingly across the screen, along with long lists of studio assistants who have recently tested positive. Kentridge draws trees and leaves and compares their lives to those of humans. “As we grow, we also grow our own death,” he says, contemplating the unknown fate of individuals.

One of Kentridge’s two main characters functions as a pessimist to the other’s optimism, portraying what sometimes reads as a hilarious sibling rivalry and sometimes the duality of humanity. As the two Kentridges discuss Greek mythology, the history of mining in Johannesburg, colonialism in Africa and the absurdity of the Soviet Union, they delve into many of the more serious topics familiar in much of the work of the artist.

Exploring the ‘paradoxes of colonialism’, Kentridge invites several actors to read from his performance piece The head and the load. Later, in grandiloquent movements, they interpret a contradictory situation in which an African soldier who had to fight alongside the French during World War I might aspire to become a citizen of the country that brutally colonized his people.

Kentridge’s Dadaist inspirations emerge during the episodes devoted to history, but his “investigations into coherence and incoherence” take place throughout the series – and it’s never clear what the titular coffee pot has to do with any of that. “What comes after always changes what comes before,” Kentridge says as a kind of conclusion during the final episode. And in as many as Self-portrait is a celebration of the creative process – Kentridge affectionately calls the studio both “a place of transformation” and “a safe space for stupidity” – it is also an exploration of the experience of time and space. In this sense, it also acts as a creative time capsule of the experience of a Covid lockdown.

• Self-portrait as a coffee pot is available to stream on Mubi. The series can also be seen from October 22 to 24 (with Kentridge hosting evening public conversations with writers and artists) at Hauser & Wirth, 18th Street, New York.