Image: GOODMAN GALLERY, Johannesburg
The presentation runs from 24 September to 7 November 2026. It includes a studio-like display of original drawings from ‘A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction)’.
The film was developed and produced over nine months in Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio. The presentation is the global premiere of a new stop-animation film by South African artist and theatre director William Kentridge.
‘A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction)’ immerses the viewer in contemporary Johannesburg, a post-colonial city facing infrastructural and environmental challenges as it adapts from its foundational gold-mining economy. The film includes trees stricken by the fungus of a non-indigenous beetle and a fictional reimagining of the July 2023 methane-gas explosion that destroyed parts of Bree Street in central Johannesburg.
Its action moves between Johannesburg’s city streets and the modernist home of industrialist Soho Eckstein, a central protagonist in Kentridge’s evolving cycle of films.
The exhibition also includes new work related to Kentridge’s production of Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘L’Orfeo’ at the 2026 Glyndebourne Festival, including a Pepper’s Ghost film installation that combines workshop footage with sculptures and works on paper. Kentridge adapted the film’s title from the West African proverb ‘A nicely built city never resists destruction’, which he had previously used in an etching series published by Caversham Press in 1995.
