SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT : WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

MUBI, the global film distributor, streaming service and production company is pleased to announce that artist William Kentridge’s extraordinary, expansive Self- Portrait As A Coffee-Pot will be available to watch worldwide exclusively on MUBI from 18 October 2024, following special previews at Toronto International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival and its presentation at the Arsenale Institute for the Politics of Representation, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, during the Venice Biennale of Art 2024.

Laying bare the creative process, Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot is a dazzling, nine-episode film series by South African artist William Kentridge, renowned for his animated drawings for projection, as well as his sculpture, theatre and opera productions over the last forty years.

Shot in his Johannesburg studio during and in the aftermath of the 2020–2022 COVID-19 pandemic and inspired in part by Charlie Chaplin, Dziga Vertov and the innovative wit of early cinema, this lively series of distinct but interconnected vignettes, at turns humorous, philosophical, political and probing, is a hymn to artistic freedom and the power of imagination, even when confronted with the challenge of isolation in enclosed spaces.

Bringing together hand-drawn animations, collage, performance and music, as well as dialogues with collaborators and doppelgängers, the series invites us to step inside the intimacy of the studio, where shared discoveries about culture, history and politics, and profound truths about the ways we live and think today are uncovered through the making of works of art.

Marking the launch of the release in October 2024, the films will screen for three days in an immersive intervention at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street in New York.

Additionally, a series of conversations, hosted by William Kentridge with special guests, will also take place each of the three nights, from 22-24 October. Further details to be announced.

William Kentridge says: “Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot is a series made to offer viewers a sense and spirit of possibility, from an artist’s perspective. It is intended as a polemic experience about a way of working, a confidence in giving an image the benefit of the doubt, and seeing what emerges... At its heart this is really a series about the optimism and agency of making, itself. There’s an inherent optimism in the activity of taking the blank piece of paper at the beginning and having something at the end. If there’s a central argument I have to offer and engage audiences, it would be the defense of an optimism of making.”

An exciting innovation for both the filmed entertainment and art worlds, the release represents an unprecedented combination of fine art acquisition and streaming rights. It marks the first time that MUBI has acquired exclusive global rights to a series edition of a work of art - the first of a limited number of editions of Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot sold by the artist’s galleries.

The nine-episode series, created and directed by William Kentridge, is executive produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of THE OFFICE PERFORMING ARTS + FILM, Joslyn Barnes of LOUVERTURE FILMS and the WILLIAM KENTRIDGE STUDIO, and edited by Walter Murch, Janus Fouché and Žana Marović.