Famous for his “filmed drawings,” or “drawn films,” William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) explores the space between the political, the associative, and the ambiguous. His work often draws upon the complex history of South Africa and apartheid. Each drawing used in his films represents the final state in a sequence of images shaped by successive additions and erasures—marks that hover on the edge of visibility, perpetually on the brink of transformation.

This drawing was created in conjunction with Stereoscope, a project that debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999. This film is the eighth installment in a decade-long film series featuring the recurring character Soho Eckstein: the archetypal white Johannesburg businessman of the post-apartheid era, and a stand-in for the artist himself. While Kentridge’s drawings were initially conceived in service to his animations, they have increasingly taken on a life of their own; by 1992, he began exhibiting them independently. In Stereoscope, a single blue line threads through the narrative, weaving between frames to suggest telegraph wires, channels of communication, water, and even emotional inundation, while also serving as a vector of action and history—literally connecting the film’s narrative threads through drawn lines that extend from one frame to the next. Notably, it is the only color to appear in the film apart from black and white, underscoring its symbolic weight.

The doubling of the drawings relates directly to the title of the film, Stereoscope, a device that creates the illusion of three-dimensionality by presenting each eye with a slightly different view of the same scene. To reconcile these differences, the eye is tricked into perceiving three dimensions. However, Kentridge is less interested in the optical effect of stereoscopy than in the conceptual possibilities of duality—exploring two related yet parallel spaces. In Drawing for Steroscope (Two Buckets), 1999, the artist works upon the pages of a grammatical guide, further unsettling conventional structures and disrupting traditional systems of order.

Stereoscope has been exhibited at institutions worldwide and is held in numerous notable permanent collections including The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; The Pinault Collection; amongst others.