This episode features artists whose works explore the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.

Employing stop-motion animation, drawing and performance, William Kentridge creates poignant films and stage productions that transform sobering political events - such as apartheid, revolution and colonialism - into poetic allegories. Kentridge, a South African artist perhaps most famous for his animated films, works in diverse media including sculpture, charcoal drawings and prints. He was included in the 2009 Time magazine 100 most influential people and is currently staging Shostakovich's The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera. Carrie Mae Weems takes inspiration from colloquial forms - a joke, song, plea or rebuke - to create complex photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and insist that pernicious stereotypes be held up to the mirror of everyday emotional and intellectual life. In a recent video and photo series, filmed around the time of the 2008 United States presidential election, Weems reflects upon the legacy of the 1960s that led to this recent historic moment. Doris Salcedo draws from the oppressive history of her country, Colombia, when creating her work. Her understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence in her own country to the larger disempowered populations of the Third World.