A moment in time photography11/21/2023 ![]() “The two things were completely understood as being mutually exclusive,” Akomfrah said. Did the power station’s toxic output affect an entire generation that breathed it in? Did it help cause their generational rebelliousness? Purple, so named for the traditional color of mourning in Ghana, includes his own memories, growing up in southwest London next to a power station spewing out smoke and carbon. “We’re on the verge of extinction but we don’t know what catalytic roles we have played in all of this. “The reality is that we as a planetary entity, human beings, have suddenly found ourselves in a place where, since 1945, we are apparently, we have left an imprint on the planet,” Akomfrah said. The Anthropocene, the term for the current geological epoch, is defined by the human impact on the planet’s ecosystems. John Akomfrah, Purple, 2017, 6 channel HD video installation with 15.1 surround sound, Dimensions variabl, 62 minutes © Smoking Dogs Films Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. John Akomfrah, Purple, 2017, 6 channel HD video installation with 15.1 surround sound, Dimensions variable, 62 minutes So for the ambitious Purple, he said, “I set out consciously to create what could be called a cradle-to-grave structure: Start off with people being born, and you watch them grow and die in the Anthropocene. But he soon realized that the format, so overdone in documentaries, might actually work in an art piece. “I spent about ten years in television making documentaries, and one of the things that I hated, because it seemed so old-fashioned, was what they called the ‘cradle-to-grave’ documentary,” Akomfrah said at the Hirshhorn. Like the artist’s other works on display in Washington this year, it runs about an hour. ![]() One of the collective’s significant early works was the single-channel piece Handsworth Songs, which Akomfrah directed. It was in 1982 that Akomfrah, who had moved to the United Kingdom with his family as a child, co-founded the Black Audio Film Collective. “Nor is it a coincidence that when I was asked to do something I was like, ‘Yes!’” “It’s not entirely coincidental that the two museums are in the center of the greatest power on earth,” he said. “So the politics of location, the question of location, seems to me to matter a huge amount.” ![]() “Growing up poor in Accra is a very different experience than being in Washington,” he told a crowd at a Hirshhorn artist’s talk in April. The weight of being represented in a single year by three concurrent showings on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.-each addressing the era’s largest concerns-is not lost on Akomfrah. And seen intermittently throughout the production are kaleidoscopic flocks of birds, flying and changing directions together in a synchronous act that ornithologists call murmuration-a strategy that wards off predators. Disturbing scenes of past colonialism pop up. Photography from Alaska, French Polynesia and Greenland is juxtaposed with archival images of industry, political movements and even scenes of life and death, with the sounds of burbling brooks and birdsong heard amid spoken word and occasional song (from Billie Holiday).įive Murmurations, by contrast, is a black-and-white meditation on the recent era of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter, depicting scenes of handwashing and isolation with those of protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, whose final minutes, as viewed through the smudged lens of a police camera, are accompanied by Floyd’s haunting cries for help. The immersive, six-screen Purple deals with the environmental crisis, balancing cinematic scenes of solitary figures standing in nature with the encroachment of smoke-belching factories and power lines. Photo by Ron Blunt © Smoking Dogs Films Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. Installation view of John Akomfrah: Purple at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden And this month, his 2021 Five Murmurations went on view at the National Museum of African Art. The 2017 video installation Purple, which the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden purchased in 2021, opened last November and continues to run for the rest of the year. The 1986 Handsworth Songs was on view earlier this year in the exhibition “This Is Britain: Photographs From the 1970s and 1980s” at the National Gallery of Art. alone, including at two Smithsonian museums. In 2023, his work is being featured in three different exhibitions in Washington, D.C. Already this year Akomfrah has been knighted-and chosen to represent Great Britain in the 2024 Venice Biennale, where he’s been featured twice before. Our daily immersion in a bombardment of images, in repeated patterns, at a fraught moment in contemporary history, makes the multichannel work of the artist John Akomfrah both familiar and especially compelling.Īnd the Ghanaian-born, London-based filmmaker is getting noticed for it.
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