In March and April of 2012, William Kentridge delivered a series of six lectures, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, at Harvard University. In June The Refusal of Time, a 5-channel video installation with complex soundscape by Philip Miller and a breathing machine, was first presented at Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany. In October the survey exhibition William Kentridge: Fortuna opened in Rio de Janeiro. In November The Refusal of Time was seen at MAXXI in Rome, and the related theatre piece Refuse the Hour was performed to sell-out audiences in both Rome and Athens.

The current exhibition of recent work at Goodman Gallery Cape, the first in Cape Town for five years, sets elements from these projects together with new work made especially for the exhibition – allowing the gallery to be the space where different bodies of work collide and make new connections.

The flipbook, NO, IT IS, designed by Fourthwall and co-published with the Goodman Gallery, was the start of a new project of making flipbooks and flipbook films. Both book and films are seen for the first time in this exhibition.