Accounts and Drawings from Underground

The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906

Kentridge William, Morris Rosalind C.

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In "Accounts and Drawings from Underground", Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration, where they have taken the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation and transformed it into something wholly new. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created and as a visual epitaph to a history of disappearances. For her part, Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Reading down and across the columns of the pages as though they were themselves shafts in the earth, she draws together the stories of migrant laborers and charts the flows of capital and desire, overwriting the text of the book to give us a palpable sense of the world that gold mining created.

About the Author

Rosalind C. Morris is professor of anthropology and former associate director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is also the author of "New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures" and "In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand".

William Kentridge is one of most prominent contemporary artists in the world, best known for his animated films based on charcoal drawings and his artistic work with books.

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