Streaming company Mubi has acquired global streaming rights to South African artist William Kentridge’s prestigious series Self-Portrait As a Coffee Pot, which explores how art is made in the digital age.
The nine-episode series by Kentridge – celebrated around the world for his influential works spanning animation, installations, theatre, opera and film – premiered as a preliminary cut at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival.
Kentridge reveals his creative process in nine 30-minute videos produced in the artist’s studio in Johannesburg during the pandemic and its aftermath, between 2020 and 2023. In “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,” Kentridge also invites audiences to ponder the same philosophical questions he asks himself across the episodes, including how our memories work, what makes us ourselves, and why history always gets us wrong.
“Playfully deconstructing and assembling the pressing concerns of our time as works of art,” Kentridge “uses hand-drawn animation, dialogue with collaborators and likenesses, and illuminates the invisible ideological forces that govern the world we live in,” according to the introduction synopsis.
The series was edited by multi-Oscar-winning American film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, whose name is closely associated with 1970s directors such as George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and also by South African digital artist Janos Fuchs and regular Kentridge collaborator Zana Marovic. .
The “Self-Portrait As a Coffee Pot” series will premiere on April 17 at the Arsenale Institute for the Politics of Representation in Venice, Italy, as an installation curated by prominent art historian and curator Caroline Kristof-Bakargiev, and will then move to the top. High-end art institutions around the world.
“Self-Portrait As a Coffee Pot” is executive produced by Rachel Chanov and Noah Pashevkin of the London and New York-based production company The Office Performance Arts + Film, and Academy Award-nominated producer Jocelyn Barnes of New York Louverture Films – which she also produced. Co-directed by Danny Glover – whose credits include Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ‘Memoria’ starring Tilda Swinton – and William Kentridge Studio.
The deal was negotiated by Moby, Jocelyn Barnes and entertainment attorney Sasha Levitts of Frankfurt Cornett Klein & Sales on behalf of the producers. Mubi grants exclusive global streaming rights through the purchase of the first of a limited number of editions sold by the artist’s galleries Hauser, Wirth and Goodman Gallery.
“This unprecedented combination of fine art acquisition and streaming rights is an exciting innovation for both the worlds of filmed entertainment and art,” Moby and the producers noted in a statement.
“The idea of the series was really made possible by the current nature of streaming. To watch at your own pace; it has become a natural form of work,” said Kentridge. “Mubi is very well curated, and they are a great partner to go out into the world,” Kentridge said.
“Throughout the making of this series, as William demonstrated the courage to engage with the art form of cinema, I once again found myself moved by emotion and wonder as the illustrations danced across the notebooks, a chorus of singers found their voice, and received wisdom,” Barnes said. About the trick, and we as viewers are invited to unleash our imagination and participate in creativity.”
Mubi’s recent and upcoming releases include Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” Ira Sachs’ “Passages,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “Strange Way of Life,” and Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex.”