William Kentridge (b. 1955)

The found maps for Atas Confessions were taken from an edition of Stielers Handatlas, Justus Perthes, Gotha, 1906. Each impression is on a different spread, in the case of this example page 4, a map of Österreich-Ungarn, the Austro-Hungarian Empire which ceased to exist in 1918 following its defeat in World War I. The menacing, anthropomorphic figures which parade over this territory, suggest metaphorical connections between cartography, in which the physical and political landscape is quantified and measured empirically, and the hubris of Imperialism. As with the fictional empire of J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians, which is set in a cold, northern-like clime and yet is immediately recognizable as South Africa under the Apartheid regime, Atas Confessions also evokes this brutal legacy, delineated in the disputed borders and place names of another empire far away in time and space.