This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode "Compassion," premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

"Compassion" features three artists -- William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems -- whose works explore conscience and the possibility of understanding and reconciling past and present, while exposing injustice and expressing tolerance for others.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century's most contentious struggles -- the dissolution of apartheid -- William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories.