Center for Visual Cultures Brown-Bag: Andrew Hennlich

In 2008, xenophobic riots broke out in South Africa targeting immigrants. A number of “absurd” images of these riots were captured in which protestors brandish objects of suburban leisure as weapons. For the South African artist William Kentridge these images represent an absurd logic. The absurd forces people to come to terms with how they make sense of bits of information received, placing these fragments of information into a narrative, which makes it a potent historical tool.