Life on landfill: the people who scrape a living from our waste
The three artists explore the connections between climate crisis, environmental justice and human survival. In this image by Khan, a reclaimer pulls his load of waste on a trolley into Mudimu Recycling, a buy-back centre in Selby, Johannesburg, to be weighed and sold
Reclaimers Micheal Morosi (left) and Johannes Matona at Mudimu Recycling, Johannesburg. 'My projects have always arisen from some sort of gap I see, something I feel strongly about that needs highlighting or commenting on'
'The work needs to be reflective of the people and the times, in both private and public, as well as institutional spaces, so that we no longer suffer the erasure and blindness of misrepresentation inflicted on us by oppressive systems and structures. I hope that we can build a more just and equal world'
A reclaimer at Johannesburg's largest landfill. Reclaimers complain of not having adequate protective clothing and as a result suffering infections and other health issues. The day this was taken, Khan nearly stepped on a cow's head
This series, on the physical toll the quest for clean water takes on women in Malawi, was originally commissioned by WaterAid and Wimbledon Foundation. It's title is a phrase used in Malawi meaning little by little. This image is of Margaret Tobias, 35, who has four children, and fetches water four times a day. 'While grounded in real-world narratives, my approach is guided by a lyrical way of seeing and shaped by a desire to evoke rather than explain'
A girl carries a basin of hot water to the bathroom to take a bath before going to school. 'I draw inspiration from music, poetry, and impressionistic art forms, allowing intuition to shape my storytelling and inviting audiences to engage with their own thoughts and experiences'
Jacqueline Aron, 14, stands in the doorway of the kitchen while she waits for her bath water to heat up before school
Enala Etifala 19, with her baby. Malawi is one of the smallest and least-developed countries in Africa. Although it has an abundance of water, including Lake Malawi – the third-largest freshwater lake on the continent – one in three people live without access to clean water. Considered a domestic chore, the responsibility of securing water falls predominantly on the shoulders of women
'My work is concerned with stereotypes, racism and the construction of the gaze,' says Ponger, who lives and works in Vienna, 'involving photography, film, installation and text material'
Ponger works across a variety of disciplines and recently set up with Hundred Heroines a weekly online film festival showing short films made by or about women
Ponger says this staged photograph from 2001 'seems to function as a table of contents for my work ever since'
'I interrogate the entangled legacies of extraction, imperialism and global capital to highlight how historical and contemporary systems of power continue to shape uneven geographies of suffering and privilege'
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
William Kentridge on politics, South Africa and ‘our great billionaire Elon Musk'
The great South African artist William Kentridge is tearing up pieces of paper at his kitchen table and pushing them around. He's showing me the process by which he created a group of sculptures for Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 'You play with these shapes and then' — he looks up to make sure I'm following — 'this one starts to become like a woman leaning forward. It's about letting yourself be guided by your eyes.' With a pair of old-fashioned pince-nez reading glasses dangling from his white button-up shirt, Kentridge combines the reassuring patience of a school art teacher with the dazzling intellect of an eminent philosophy professor. One moment we're tearing up paper, the next we're discussing Plato. The kitchen table we're sitting at is in his small flat opposite the British Museum, but home is South Africa, in the Johannesburg house in which he grew up and still lives. His parents were lawyers and his father, Sir Sydney Woolf Kentridge, played a leading role in some of the most significant political trials of the apartheid era, including defending Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trial, and the inquest into the death of Steve Biko. Kentridge's parents left South Africa in the 1980s but he stayed on, married and raised his three children there. Two of them now live in London and it was the birth of his first grandchild that prompted the artist and his wife, Anne, to buy the flat we're sitting in. • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews Kentridge flicks open his phone to show me a picture of him standing with a small grandson in front of a huge, twisting bronze sculpture that dwarfs them both. An invitation from Yorkshire Sculpture Park more than ten years ago pushed him into making these large works. He's known for his drawings, animated films, theatre and opera productions but he didn't see sculpture as part of his practice. 'And then I understood that it was like the puppets I've made for theatre and shadow plays, made with little wire joints so you can hinge pieces together and move them until you find the attitude you want, like this woman bending forward,' he says, pointing to the shape he's made on the table. He adds that 'this is a great exercise for the children's programme at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park because it works as well with an eight-year-old as it does with a 17-year-old or an MA student'. To understand Kentridge you need to know that he started in theatre before he began drawing. He is best known for his bold black-and-white charcoal works and animated films that reflect on the politics and history of South Africa. A fan of the Dadaists and Jonathan Swift, he runs a thread of absurdist humour through much of his work. In one of his short films being screened at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Kentridge poses astride a flimsy wooden horse. Is this a satirical reference to the number of statues of men on horseback that populate European cities? 'They're all about conquest,' he explains. 'And also people on horseback start taking on the attributes of the horse. They are sitting high up with straightened backs, so they feel grand.' Another of his animated films on display is my favourite: More Sweetly Play the Dance. This procession of figures played by actors and dancers and led by a brass band is a carnival of dance, music and grief that moves slowly from left to right across seven cinema screens in a ruined, burnt-out landscape. It was created as a memorial for ebola victims but the images are timeless, recalling medieval pilgrims or the endless stream of refugees who move across our small screens fleeing conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine or Sudan. Processions are a recurring trope in Kentridge's work, which brings us back to the group of sculptures he referred to during my short art lesson. Paper Procession was a site-specific commission made for Yorkshire Sculpture Park and born from the torn-out pages of a discarded accounting book. He started with shapes cut out of paper and then transformed them into 5m-high works made from thin sheets of aluminium and steel. Coloured in red, yellow and orange, they march determinedly past a green yew hedge. 'The key was to keep the lightness of the sense of torn paper and then, using a forklift truck and all the people in my studio jumping together, bending the aluminium to give the forms the right sense of movement,' he says. • The £3 million battle to save an artwork most of us have never seen I'm struck by the image of him and his collaborators jumping together on sheets of aluminium, as if it were some absurdist theatrical performance. As a young man, Kentridge aspired to be an actor and trained at the famous Jacques Lecoq school of mime and physical theatre in Paris; he uses the techniques he learnt there in his art. 'The English tradition of theatre starts with an analysis of text and psychology,' he says. 'With physical theatre it's about movement. How does movement reveal a character's age, whether they're relaxed or tense? You reveal the psychology of a subject by what is happening in their body, and you can do the same when teaching someone to draw.' His passion for processions was inspired by works including medieval paintings of the dance against death that appeared during the plague, Goya's A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, and 'the shadows in Plato's cave'. For Plato the shadows represented ignorance, but Kentridge is sceptical about the light of knowledge freeing the prisoner, pointing out that alongside the Enlightenment came colonialism, another key theme in his work. 'There's a lot you can understand by looking at shadows,' he says. Kentridge was born in 1955 and studied politics at university in Johannesburg while taking classes in fine art and drama in the evenings. His parents had several friends who were artists 'and it made me realise that they didn't all live in Paris with a beret and palette'. His father, who is 102 and living in north London, was both encouraging and sceptical of his son's work. 'When I told him I was putting on a production of Goethe's Faustus with puppets, his reaction was: 'OK, but I'm wondering why the puppets are necessary?'' His Faustus in Africa! with puppets is being revived this summer at the Edinburgh International Festival in a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company (of War Horse fame). He conceived of the idea in 1995 when the first African National Congress (ANC) government had taken power. 'Faustus is about a pact with the Devil and I wanted to look at what concessions the ANC made to gain power and avoid civil war,' he says. 'Thirty years on it still feels surprisingly relevant.' • The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for July 2025 At 70, Kentridge is more prolific than ever: his nine-part film Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot launched on the streaming platform Mubi last year, he has a chamber opera touring festivals around Europe, and he is working on a new production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo for Glyndebourne. 'It's my father's favourite place in the world,' he says. 'There have been many family outings there over the decades.' Right now he's looking forward to returning to his studio in Johannesburg. 'There's a kind of a balance between work that I do entirely on my own, drawings and animation, and then projects which need many collaborators,' he says. The performance work evolves from the arts centre he founded and funds in the city's downtown area. 'We teach, do workshops and stage performances,' he says, adding that he thrives on the energy that collaboration brings. 'It's not just about giving back to other artists, it's also very much for me and what I can discover working with them.' As I leave, I ask if he watched the recent footage of President Trump monstering South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the White House. 'I didn't dare watch it through. It was too painful, the boorishness of it, but I thought our president did well,' he says firmly, before adding: 'Our great billionaire Elon Musk doesn't help matters either. There are several million white South Africans who went through the same kind of schooling as Musk and haven't ended up as awful or as rich.'William Kentridge: the Pull of Gravity is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park to April 19, 2026; Faustus in Africa! is at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, August 20-23
BBC News
14 hours ago
- BBC News
Assault charge dropped against Rivals actor arrested on set
Charges have been dropped against an actor who was arrested while filming on the set of Adams, 45, had denied assault occasioning actual bodily harm against his long-term fiancee Louise Payne in an incident in March. The supporting actor, from Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, was arrested on 4 June at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where he was filming a scene for the Disney+ Payne attended a hearing at Bristol Crown Court on Monday, where prosecutor Christine Hart told the judge she "didn't wish to proceed with the case". Judge William Hart formally entered a not-guilty verdict in the case, telling Mr Adams: "You are free to leave, thank you." Rivals, starring David Tennant, Danny Dyer and Emily Atack, is based on the novel of the same name by Dame Jilly outside court, Mr Adams said: "They turned up on set and nicked me like I was a wanted man on the run."Now I can get back with my agent and get back on Rivals, hopefully. "I'm grateful everything has been sorted. We just want to get on with our lives."Ms Payne said: "I didn't want to press charges from the beginning."I had to come to court to say I didn't want to go ahead with it."
The Independent
15 hours ago
- The Independent
Update in case of Rivals actor arrested on set on assault charge
An actor who was arrested while filming on the set of the TV show Rivals has had the charge against him dropped. Nigel Adams, 45, was arrested by officers from Avon and Somerset Police at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire in June. He was later charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm against his long-term partner Louise Payne. The alleged incident took place on 31 May. Both Mr Adams and Ms Payne attended Bristol Crown Court on Monday morning for a plea and trial preparation hearing. The actor, from Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, pleaded not guilty to the charge. Christine Hart, prosecuting, said she would be offering no evidence against Mr Adams. Ms Hart said: 'Subsequent to the case being charged, there is a statement by Ms Payne. 'She is here at court today, she sits in the public gallery. 'She has made it clear she didn't wish to proceed with the case. I have spoken to her at length, as has the officer in charge. 'Taking into account the evidence already in the case and that statement, the only option I have is to offer no evidence on the outstanding count.' Judge William Hart told the court he would formally enter a not guilty verdict in the case. The judge told Mr Adams: 'You are free to leave, thank you.' Rivals, starring David Tennant, Danny Dyer and Emily Atack, is based on the novel of the same name by Dame Jilly Cooper. It is based on the rivalry over an independent television franchise in the Cotswolds in the 1980s. Speaking outside court, Mr Adams and Ms Payne said they were grateful the case had been dropped. 'Now I can get back with my agent and get back on Rivals, hopefully. I still have the costume.' He added: 'I'm grateful everything has been sorted. We just want to get on with our lives.' Mr Adams and Ms Payne have been engaged for seven years and said they are now looking forward to getting married. Ms Payne said: 'I didn't want to press charges from the beginning. I had to come to court to say I didn't want to go ahead with it. 'I'm happy it's all sorted.'
