This survey of British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah—his first in the United Sates—brilliantly makes a case for his three-and-a-half-decade career with just four video installations: One from the early 1980s and three from the last six years. Yet this handful of works (four other films from the ’80s and ’90s play in museum’s theater on Wednesdays), impeccably installed in a series of darkened galleries, summarize the strategies, themes and motifs of Akomfrah’s practice.
Akomfrah cofounded the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, partly in response to the racial unrest in London at the time. The group’s first collaborative effort, Expeditions One: Signs of Empire (1983), took form as a slideshow set to music mixed with ominous rumbles. Featuring close-ups of imperial monuments alternating with horrific scenes from Britain’s colonies, the piece contrasts the noble certitude of the former with depredations of the latter; meanwhile, overlaid snippets of text provide a running commentary. Though it lacks a conventional narrative, Expeditions One: Signs of Empire’s combination of archival imagery, critical theory and jarring montages provided the template for Akomfrah later works.
Thirty years later, Transfigured Night (2013) employed similar elements. The complex two-channel video meditates on the long history of political ideals, their failures and their reverberations in the present by intercutting 1960s newsreels of leaders from newly independent African nations with scenes of political turmoil in their countries. Likewise, the piece also juxtaposes poetic shots of the Washington Monument covered in scaffolding with images of African-Americans at the Lincoln Memorial. Melancholy suffuses the work, as it does The Unfinished Conversation (2012), an oblique profile the black British writer and public intellectual Stuart Hall. Its allusive overlapping fragments of biography, social movements and cultural history, however, is less about a individual life than it is an exploration of the unresolved status of black identity in the contemporary world.
The exhibition’s centerpiece, the three-channel Vertigo Sea (2015) juxtaposes beauty and terror. Ravishing images of the ocean share screen time with all sorts of disasters: Reenacted scenes of the transatlantic slave trade; harrowing sequences of whaling and polar bear hunting; glimpses of offshore oil rigs and melting ice sheets; and views of refugees packed aboard capsizing boats. Black figures in 18th-century garb stare out onto the water, their backs to the camera like people in Romantic-era paintings contemplating the sublime. Stand-ins for the artist and the viewer, they stoically bear witness to the elemental power of nature and its clash with human history. By asking us to see the ocean in both majestic and tragic terms, Akomfrah transforms the joys of wonder into the weight of responsibility.