MUBI Presents: William Kentridge’s ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ New York Premiere at Hauser & Wirth

Celebrating the exclusive MUBI worldwide streaming release of artist William Kentridge’s episodic series ‘Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot’, please join us at Hauser & Wirth’s 18^th Street gallery to view the films and take part in a special series of talks with Kentridge and special guests.

Laying bare the creative process, ‘Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot’ is a nine-episode film series by South African artist William Kentridge, renowned for his animated drawings for projection, as well as his sculpture, theatre and opera productions over the last forty years. The series will be available streaming worldwide exclusively on the global film distributor and streaming service MUBI from Friday 18 October 2024, following special previews at Toronto International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival and its presentation at the Arsenale Institute for the Politics of Representation, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, during the Venice Biennale of Art 2024.

The films will be on view at Hauser & Wirth 18^th Street from 10 am – 6 pm Tuesday 22 October through Thursday 24 October, featuring two public conversations with William Kentridge on 23 and 24 October.

MUBI presents: William Kentridge’s ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ New York premiere

Tuesday 22 October – Thursday 24 October
10 am – 6 pm
Series on view at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street

Wednesday 23 October
In Conversation: William Kentridge and Lynne Tillman

Click here to register.

Thursday 24 October
In Conversation: William Kentridge, Martine Syms and Vinson Cunningham

Click here to register.

This program is free and open to the public; however, due to limited space, reservations for each individual talk is required.

Here is a special gift from MUBI in celebration of this release.

About William Kentridge
William Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his artworks, theater and opera productions. His method combines drawing and erasing, tearing, gestural painting, collage, weaving, casting, writing, film, performance, music, theater and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, yet maintain a space for contradiction and uncertainty.

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he currently lives and works, Kentridge grew up under the pall of apartheid. His practice has parsed and questioned the historical record—responding to the past as it ineluctably shapes the present—and created a world within his art that both mirrors and shadows the inequities and absurdities of our own. By employing varied mediums, Kentridge seeks to construct meaning through the use of historical resources, including maps, language and everyday imagery, while always maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty.

About Vinson Cunningham
Vinson Cunningham joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. Since 2018, he has served as a critic for the magazine, writing about theatre, television, and more. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2024, and was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Drmatic Criticism for 2021-2022. And, in 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his Profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and is a co-host of Critics at Large, The New Yorker’s weekly podcast about culture and the arts. His début novel, “Great Expectations,” came out in 2024.

About Martine Syms
Martine Syms is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. She has shown extensively including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Louis Vuitton, Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, the Future Fields Art Prize and is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Syms is the writer and director of The African Desperate (MUBI), which was the closing night film of New Directors/New Films 2022 and nominated for an Independent Spirit Award in 2023.

About Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman's novels include Haunted Houses; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions, nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK, 2021). Her short fiction books include SOMEDAY THIS WILL BE FUNNY and THIS IS NOT IT; nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–67, with photographs by Stephen Shore and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2025, Soft Skull Press will publish her selected stories, Thrilled to Death; in 2026, Zwirner Press will publish a collection of Tillman’s essays on art and culture.

About MUBI
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI creates, curates, acquires and champions visionary films, bringing them to audiences all over the world.