John Akomfrah

23 March 2020

Magazine C& Magazine

1 min de lecture

Feature

Film screening

Post-colonial

John Akomfrah

Hundreds of independent art and museums spaces were forced to close due to the Corona-Crisis. While this brings particularly independent spaces and independent cultural producers to the edge of existential crisis, we would like to show solidarity. In this series we are celebrating all the fantastic artistic events that are right now sitting behind closed doors. This time John Akomfrah's solo exhibition at Secession, Vienna.

The filmmaker and screenwriter John Akomfrah’s atmospheric films probe the structure of memory, the diasporic experiences of migrants, and the historical, social, and political roots of postcolonialism. A founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998), he continues to work with his long-term creative partners David Lawson and Lina Gopaul. At the Secession, John Akomfrah presents three film installations whose themes complement one another: the three-channel projection Vertigo Sea (2015) and the two single-channel pieces Peripeteia (2012) and Mnemosyne (2010). A recurrent motif in his art that connects all three works on film is water, which acts as a reservoir of recollections; in the immensity of the ocean, it also marks the scene of the colonial conquests and the transatlantic slave trade as well as contemporary migrant flows.