John Akomfrah (b. 1957) creates considerate video works of haunting audiovisual depth. He tells of the unconventional adjustments and crises of the current and previous on attribute large-format screens. From November 9, 2023 to January 28, 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting for the primary time a complete overview of the artist’s work in Germany, that includes a number of three main multichannel installations from latest years: The Unfinished Dialog (2012), Vertigo Sea (2015), and Akomfrah’s new work, Changing into Wind (2023). A co-founder of the influential London-based Black Audio Movie Collective (established in 1982), Akomfrah’s work interweaves newly shot movie sequences with archival materials to create multilayered, at instances associative collages, steadily within the type of simultaneous narrative buildings. Akomfrah’s immersive installations critically look at colonial pasts, international migration, and the local weather disaster. He addresses one-dimensional historic representations by permitting a number of views to emerge within the narrative, disrupting the notion of linearity and the phantasm of a one and solely fact.

THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION
The Unfinished Dialog pays homage to the well-known influential British cultural theorist, sociologist, and founding father of cultural research, Stuart Corridor (1932–2014), with whom Akomfrah was lengthy acquainted. The artist recounts a delicate, nearly poetic exploration of Corridor’s legacy, utilizing the sociologist’s personal life story as a springboard for inspecting his theories and concepts about id, immigration, and colonialism. Akomfrah masterfully weaves collectively assorted materials from sources resembling Corridor’s personal intensive archive, together with his speeches and interviews in addition to pictures, and historic occasions. The ensuing multilayered acoustic and experiential area directs a vital stare upon British society. The Unfinished Dialog begins with colourful Caribbean landscapes that Akomfrah combines with black-and-white scenes from industrial England. Corridor, who was born in Jamaica in 1932, got here to Oxford to review literature in 1951. Akomfrah hyperlinks Corridor’s theoretical work and his radio and tv appearances within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties with recordings of occasions and the individuals who formed British society throughout this era, together with the unsolved homicide of the Antiguan Kelso Cochrane, the marketing campaign for nuclear disarmament, and the Aldermaston marches. There are additionally literary references to figures resembling William Blake, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf. Jazz music is one other central facet that runs by means of the movie, each as a soundtrack and as movie footage of musicians enjoying reside and rotating report discs. The movie set up displays Corridor’s method that id will not be a state of being however moderately a means of “turning into,” that’s, continuously in flux, a product of historical past, recollections, and intersections between the private and non-private spheres. Corridor didn’t regard id and ethnic affiliation as fastened phrases however moderately as components of an “ever-unfinished dialog.” The Unfinished Dialog could be learn each as an experimental extension of a documentary aesthetic and as a complete vital visualization and questioning of one-dimensional narratives about what life is absolutely like for Black individuals in Nice Britain.

VERTIGO SEA
Vertigo Sea is a poetic meditation on movie that shifts from one century to a different in its exploration of the connection between individuals and the ocean. Throughout three massive screens, Akomfrah juxtaposes footage he has shot himself in Scotland on the Faroe Islands and Skye, and in Norway, with archive materials that features breathtaking excerpts from BBC nature documentaries and fragments recited from the books Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville and Whale Nation (1988) by Heathcote Williams. One focus is the ocean and the exploitative buildings with which it’s related, however the work additionally addresses present ecological points. The artist illustrates this by linking the whaling trade with the kidnapping of tens of millions of African individuals in the course of the transatlantic slave commerce. Refugees at the moment trying to cross the ocean equally play a job. Magnificence and terror go hand in hand in tightly edited photos. Akomfrah reveals one scene from a film that depicts the real-life bloodbath of over 130 enslaved individuals by the crew of the British ship Zong in 1781. A determine in historic uniform seems repeatedly within the video set up as an embodiment of Olaudah Equiano (1745–97), who was kidnapped from Nigeria as a toddler and enslaved, however after emancipation turned a key campaigner in opposition to the slave commerce. Interweaving biographies resembling these is a tactic usually utilized by Akomfrah to shift the main focus to ignored histories. The intersection of genres, epochs, and views is one other recognizable stylistic machine the artist employs in Vertigo Sea to create surprising associations and disrupt our notions of linear narration.
Vertigo Sea premiered on the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) as a part of Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition “All of the World’s Futures” and is one among Akomfrah’s central works.

BECOMING WIND
In his new work on 5 screens, Changing into Wind, Akomfrah creates an allegorical illustration of the Backyard of Eden and its disappearance. In elegiac black-and-white scenes, the set up evokes a previous when an ample range of plant and animal species nonetheless existed on the planet, whereas additionally directing a gaze on the precarious humancentric ecosystem of the Anthropocene, the present epoch of local weather change. Phrases steadily seem on the screens bearing sentiments that many individuals really feel apply to them, regarding the local weather disaster, for instance: “We should be fast” and “It strikes amongst us.” Youngsters are repeatedly seen enjoying on the seashore or within the waves. Concurrently the video accompanies trans* actors and activists of their on a regular basis lives. The artist is desirous about a selected expertise from which one thing very common could be learn: the deep-seated want to have the ability to develop one’s personal id freely. The versatile identities of the long run face challenges which have by no means existed earlier than. That is the place Akomfrah identifies intersections with dramatically altering ecological areas and future variations to them. “We nearly must change into wind-like to get there,” says the artist with respect to the speedy adjustments occurring within the current day.
The video premiered in 2023 on the fifteenth Sharjah Biennale.

Curated by
Julia Grosse

at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
till January 28, 2024