William Kentridge, Bronwyn Lace,
& The Centre for the Less Good Idea
Season Two invites visitors on an immersive journey into the creative world of William Kentridge, Bronwyn Lace, and The Centre for The Less Good Idea, co-founded by the two artists in 2016.
A significant programme of site-specific installations and residencies culminates in two weekends of live performance, taking place across the palace and grounds in May and August 2026.
With the estate’s royal heritage as a starting point, the programme rediscovers Valdemars Slot as a living site for creativity and cultural exchange.
William Kentridge leads visitors through the palace in a three-part installation that foregrounds play and artistic process as a strategy to interrogate historical myth-making. Embedded in the former Corn Barn, Bronwyn Lace’s film Feast or Famine ties the surrounding natural landscape with historical cycles of creation and destruction. Anchored in the socio-political context of present-day South Africa, the installations carry universal resonance and a message of hope for the future.
Born out of Kentridge’s experimental visual language and led by Lace, The Centre for the Less Good Idea animates the season with a programme of residency and live events. Regular contributors to the Johannesburg-based incubator, Anathi Conjwa, Micca Manganye, Neo Muyanga, and Teresia Phuti develop a live programme in collaboration with Danish partners, including Andreas Borregaard and Halina Wigocka Wamberg. Delving into the palace’s archives of music and literature, these artists invite visitors to experience a dynamic, spontaneous working process, with the history and landscape of Valdemars Slot at its core.
William Kentridge
South African, b. 1955
Rooted in the socio-political history of South Africa, William Kentridge’s practice rejects certainty, and questions grand narratives from the realms of history and politics, but also science, literature and music. A vision of historical narrative as partial and shifting pervades Kentridge’s installations at Valdemars Slot, with ambiguity or contradiction embedded in their form.
Kentridge welcomes visitors to the palace Entrance Hall with a self-portrait on horseback, which parodies the painted monarchs that parade the walls of the adjacent King’s Room. The cardboard cut-out sits astride a wooden tripod like a makeshift theatre prop. Surrounded by maps and materials from the palace archives, the sculpture calls historical record into question by staging the raw materials through which it’s conveyed.
This playful introduction prepares visitors for a glimpse backstage, as Kentridge’s expressive gestures envelop the steep attic staircase. Legible only from the bottom of the stairs, the fragmented Fire Walker embodies the privilege of historical hindsight, whilst speaking to the subject's’ precarious lives. A celebrated anti-monument, the Fire Walker was originally created for the City of Johannesburg in 2010. The installation spotlights the usually unseen, overlooked lives of the city’s poorest labourers, inviting parallels with the lives of the servants who used the staircase in centuries’ past.
Transported through this enclosed passageway, visitors find themselves in an imaginative, intimate world inside the dark-beamed attic. The vast space is punctuated by two large screens, surrounded by chairs and cushions to recall a childhood fort, or studio late at night. This sets the scene for two short film collections, which further explore the creative world that Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea inhabit: Self-Portrait As a Coffee Pot and The Long Minute, curated by Bronwyn Lace. Born out of the Covid-19 lockdowns, these films offer intimate insight into the life of Kentridge’s studio, the workings of his mind, and the energy of the Johannesburg-based incubator space.
“Often, you start with a good idea, It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that The Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.”
— William Kentridge, 2016
The Centre for the Less Good Idea
Johannesburg, est. 2016
Drawing on the conceptual as well as visual identity of Kentridge’s practice, The Centre for the Less Good Idea embraces friction and misunderstanding as catalysts for new ideas. Over the past nine years more than 2500 artists have created performances, films, installations and musical works in collaboration with the Centre.
Spontaneous activations taking place in May with Danish artists including Andreas Borregaard and Halina Wamberg Wigocka evolve into larger-scale compositions for choral and dance groups this summer. Their primary stage is the former Carriage Barn, where recorded shadow theatre converges with live performance. Accompanied by newly commissioned films as part of The Long Minute series initiated by Kentridge in 2020, the residency brings diverse creative practices into conversation.
Valdemars Slot is collaborating with The Centre for the Less Good Idea to develop a new series of films as part of The Long Minute.
The Long Minute is a series of experimental short videos made in the studios and homes of artists, which offer engaging insights into a diverse array of creative practices. Originating in the Covid-19 lockdown, this ongoing project began as a method of continuing in the virtual realm the experimental collaborations that are the core of the Centre’s endeavours. Created in the spirit of open and cross-disciplinary dialogue that animates Centre’s practice, these films unpack the nature of performance and the process, and act as prompts for new creative work.
Interspersed with films made by South African artists participating in Season Two, and Danish collaborators are several Long Minutes created by William Kentridge. These miniature works represent potent threads within his larger body of work. They also reveal what he brings as a mentor at the Centre, drawing out the ways in which his collaborative and methodological approach shapes and animates the programme.
“My communal practice involves co-founding, with William Kentridge, The Centre for the less Good Idea in Johannesburg in 2016. Today, I am its director and lead its international projects. The Centre is a physical and immaterial space to pursue incidental discoveries made in the process of producing work. We take our impulse from the Setswana proverb ‘E a re ngaka kgolo go retelelwa, go alafe ngakana/ If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor’.”
– Bronwyn Lace
Bronwyn Lace
Feast or Famine
South African, b. 1980
Beyond the palace in the former Corn Barn, Bronwyn Lace evokes the legacy of apartheid through universal forms, rooted in the natural world. Projected from high in the rafters, Feast or Famine shows Southern African carrion beetles feasting on the body of a European Barn Owl. The insects’ frenetic movement illuminates the raw space to the staccato rhythm of time-lapse photography.
Originally captured in the basement of Vienna’s Natural History Museum, the film is transformed by South African musicians Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana. Their song of mourning and loss animates the barn’s church-like vaults with visceral emotion. Evoking the way in which history is retold and reinterpreted, artists from the Centre discover the installation again through live performance in May and August.
Artist Bios
William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg)
Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice spans drawings, films, theatre and opera. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2025); MFA Houston, Texas (2023); The Broad, Los Angeles (2022); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2019). A major travelling retrospective opened at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2016 before touring internationally, including to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2017). Kentridge has participated in Documenta (2012, 2002, 1997) and Venice Biennale (2015, 2005, 1999, 1993).
Bronwyn Lace (b. 1984 Milton Keynes, UK)
Lace works between South Africa and Austria, with a practice centred on collaborative and interdisciplinary forms of artistic production. She collaborated with William Kentridge in founding The Centre for the Less Good Idea in 2016 in Johannesburg, where she serves as Director. In 2020 Lace co-founded The Zone in Vienna, a collective exploring new approaches to inquiry and curation across the arts, sciences and philosophy.
The Centre for the Less Good Idea (est. 2016, Johannesburg)
Founded by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace, The Centre creates and supports experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary artistic projects through short, intensive periods of research and performance. Since 2024 its programme has been led by Neo Muyanga, working alongside SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea, directed by Athena Mazarakis, and The Centre Outside The Centre, led by Bronwyn Lace. Recent projects include those at The Royal Academy and The Barbican in London, Komische Opera, Berlin, and RedCat Theatre, Los Angeles amongst others.
Artists in residence: Anathi Conjwa, Bronwyn Lace, Micca Manganye, Neo Potlako Muyanga, and Teresia Phuti Mojela
Local collaborators: Andreas Borregaard and Halina Wamberg Wigocka