Filmmaker John Akomfrah Meditates On Disappearance, Memory, Death, And The African Diaspora In Europe

In the exhibition Hauntologies at the Carroll / Fletcher gallery in London John Akomfrah, one of the UK’s most innovative film-makers of the last 25 years, offers a personal meditation on disappearance, memory, and death. Through a series of new works, Akomfrah makes manifest many of the most significant influences on his practice, whilst continuing his investigations into the nature of identity.

The term ‘hauntology’ was coined by Jaques Derrida in his 1993 text Specters of Marx. In this text, Derrida argued that Marxism will be haunting Western cultures, even from the grave. It refers to the state of the specter that is both absent and present. However, it goes beyond the more stereotypical image of the eerie ghost portrayed in mainstream culture to explore the ways that past events, even if unrecorded, haunt and influence the present.

Best known for his cinema and television work with the Black Audio Film Collective, co-founded in 1982, this exhibition marks Akomfrah’s return to his earlier experiments in the gallery space. In Hauntologies, installation, image, and sound expand and acquire autonomy from each other, coexisting in a dialogue as they invoke past existences and their effect in the present.

Documentary “Seven Songs for Malcom X”, produced by Black Audio Film Collective

For the last thirty years, Akomfrah has been committed to giving a voice and a presence to the legacy of the African diaspora in Europe—filling in the voids in history by digging into historical archives to create film essays and speculative fictional stories about past lives and future possibilities. Costume dramas have been critical to this exploration since they provide a staging of history and suggest that one can have a direct access to the past.

His new installation Psyche (below), presented on three cubic monitors, blends fragments taken from Kenneth Macpherson‘s Borderline, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo‘s Winstanley, Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub‘s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Sergei M. Eisenstein‘s Qué viva México! and Battleship Potemkin, and Peter Watkin‘s Culloden.

Psyche

The work both pays homage to this genre and analyses its patterns and narrative strategies, such as the emphasis on the facial expressions or the relationship between protagonists and epic landscapes—genre conventions which are then employed in Akomfrah’s new film Peripeteia, presented in the adjacent space. Peripeteia takes as its starting point two drawings by the sixteenth century artist Albrecht Durer. The portraits are among the earliest Western representations of black people whose existences are now “lost to the winds of history”. Akomfrah brings these characters back to life as they wander in a contemporary British landscape and recall their origins.

Peripeteia

The influences of Tarkovsky within Akomrah’s work inhabit a sculptural installation evoking a seaside burial site that occupies the main space in the lower galleries. In At the Graveside of Tarkovsky the fragmented music of a soundtrack collaged from Tarkovsky’s films overlays excerpts from Akomfrah’s images in which the presence of Tarkovsky is obliquely, yet vibrantly, manifest.

Throughout the whole exhibition space, sounds streaming from the different works co-exist almost unimpeded, sliding between harmony and disruption, creating a complex cacophony that speaks of the presence of a haunting, unifying force that immerses visitors and triggers past memories.

John Akomfrah: Hauntologies
5 October – 8 November 2012
Carroll / Fletcher