Accounts and Drawings from Underground

In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, artist William Kentridge and writer and anthropologist 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.