EXCLUSIVE: Audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival are about to get a treat: the world premiere of a nonfiction series starring and directed by the extraordinary South African artist William Kentridge. Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot defies easy encapsulation, but an attempt might begin with a description of the series’ setting: the interior of Kentridge’s studio, where he makes and re-makes magnificent large-scale drawings, contemplates the artistic process and various fundamental philosophical questions, and wonders whether perhaps he hasn’t become shorter by two centimeters as he approaches 70 years of age.

Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of the African Artists’ Foundation, profiles William Kentridge, South Africa’s most influential contemporary artist ahead of his major exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. William Kentridge has been a global creative powerhouse for the best part of two decades, yet it feels like he’s only just entering his stride. South Africa’s most influential contemporary artist is the subject of a major autumn exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which will fill its Main Galleries with works spanning Kentridge’s wide-ranging practice, from drawing, etchings, collage, printmaking, film and sculpture to tapestry, theatre, opera, dance and music.

William Kentridge hasn’t always followed good advice. When he was beginning his career, “all my friends told me to do one thing and do it well,” the artist recalls. “Just do drawing, they said. Just do theater. Only make films because otherwise you get caught between them. For a long time I tried that, and I failed at all of them. Now I don’t even pretend to know what form an idea will ultimately take or what project it will end up in. I just get on with doing things knowing they will end up somewhere.”

Amongst the most recent works, made in 2021 – 2022, will be a sequence of large-scale tapestries, created especially for the Royal Academy galleries and made in the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Diepsloot, Johannesburg. There will also be a group of large flower drawings, as well as a selection of Kentridge’s distinctive tree drawings. Many of these include rubrics, recalling a tradition that dates back to medieval manuscripts to emphasise certain words within a text. Conjunctions of words are gathered by Kentridge and used in his drawings in an apparently random manner, setting up juxtapositions which simultaneously hover on the edge of meaning and elude analysis.