'A Letter To Felice'
Pepper's Ghost Diorama 2026
Diorama with dual-channel HD video and scenography. Duration - 14:17 min.
Created for the exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, which opened on the 16th April 2026, ‘A Letter to Felice’ is a homage to Franz Kafka.
This marks the first time that William Kentridge has explicitly dedicated a work to the Prague writer, whose literature has long informed his artistic practice. The work is composed of lines drawn from around twenty texts - novels, diaries, and letters (among them one addressed to Felice Bauer, Kafka's fiancée) - selected almost at random, then cut up and rearranged to form a loose narrative structure.
‘A Letter to Felice’ unfolds as a drama in six acts, centred around an assassination and Kafka's reflections after being unwittingly caught up in it.
The scenes move from morning exercises based on Kafka's own routines to typing and street observations, a ballet between Kafka and Felice,
and a silent film featuring performances by Kentridge wearing a Kafka mask. The historical context is suggested through military exercises and images of Prague from the 1910s and 1920s. Infused with the artist's own sense of the absurd, ‘A Letter to Felice’ evokes the early twentieth century as a moment of fear and instability, punctuated by fleeting moments of insouciance.
‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was a Victorian theatrical illusion technique that was popularized by John Henry Pepper in 1862. Objects and performers behind the mirror can be seen (if they are lit), while images or performers in front of the mirror are reflected (if they are lit) into an indeterminate ‘spectral’ space in the audiences’ field of vision.
Drawing on this historical device I designed and constructed a miniature environment in which theatre, cinema, and literature converge.
This new application of the illusion technique offers a contained, perpetually performing world.
Reflected holograms, along with prerecorded moving images, interact with the curated physical scenography placed in the set.
These Pepper's Ghost Dioramas have become a vehicle for creating multi-layered, non-linear narratives which upset conventional ways of storytelling.