Kentridge's Shostakovich works because apartheid fell, not because animation is brilliant

William Kentridge's Oh to Believe in Another World, screening at the Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan, is a technical marvel — an hour of collage animation layered with live choreography interpreting Shostakovich's 10th Symphony. It deserves every superlative the Guardian lavishes on it. But technical mastery and artistic ambition tell you nothing about what the work actually means. Depends entirely on where it is shown and by whom.

Kentridge made this piece in 1994-95, during South Africa's transition from apartheid. At that moment, the move was brilliant: deploy a Russian anti-totalitarian composer against a white minority regime that claimed European cultural authority as its own legitimacy. Shostakovich had encoded dissent in form; Kentridge animated that encoding into visible political resistance. The strategy worked because it operated inside a specific power struggle — it used the colonizer's own cultural vocabulary to delegitimize his claim to civilization.

The work has traveled since. It arrives in Baku as a celebrated South African artist's interpretation of a canonical work, reviewed as formally innovative and thematically profound. But profundity about what? The excerpt mentions grief, idealism, humanity. Abstractions that float free of the material argument the piece originally made. Once the work leaves the context of active political resistance and enters the circuit of international cultural prestige, something shifts.

Kentridge is now 71, internationally honored, secure. The animation technique that once functioned as a weapon against state power now circulates as evidence of artistic vision. Azerbaijan, governed by Ilham Aliyev's family autocracy since 1993, hosts it as cultural spectacle. No one in Baku watches this work and reads it as intervention in their own political struggle. It's not meant for them. It's meant for the international viewer who understands Shostakovich, appreciates innovation, admires the artist's stature. The formal brilliance remains; the political accountability vanishes.

This matters because it reveals a trap in how we discuss political art once it becomes successful. We treat formal mastery as though it retains its meaning independent of context, as if technique itself carries the politics. It doesn't. The work says something entirely different when performed by a celebrated elder statesman in a nation's flagship festival than it said when a dissident animator in a transitional country used it to say: the regime's claim to cultural legitimacy is a lie. Brilliance without that material ground is just brilliance.