ART-PRESENTATION: John Akomfrah-Purple
At a time when according to the UN, greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are at their highest levels in history, with people experiencing the significant impacts of climate change, including shifting weather patterns, rising sea level, and more extreme weather events, Akomfrah’s “Purple” brings a multitude of ideas into conversation.
By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Museu Coleção Berardo Archive
In contrast with the singular emphasis of the ocean in “Vertigo Sea”, in his epic six-channel video installation “Purple” that is on presentation at Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon, John Akomfrah combines archival material with newly staged footage and a hypnotic sound score. The new film sequences were recorded in regions with particularly climate-sensitive ecosystems, such as Greenland, Alaska and the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia and at various sites around the UK. Combined with images and film clips from the 1940s to the present day, they form a multi-layered montage of politics, history, and fiction. Parallel themes run through the hour-long work. In six monumental projections these fragments are woven into a whole, and open for a multitude of reflections on the delicate relationship between humans and the planet. These include animal extinctions, the memory of ice, the plastic ocean and global warming. Akomfrah has combined hundreds of hours of archival footage with newly shot scenes and a hypnotic sound score to produce the video installation. Comprised of five “movements” and an epilogue that together are structured like a tone poem, “Purple” worries simple description: Its multiple parts are perpetually in motion, conceptually and stylistically. Its intellectual reach decries crude summation; and, despite hints that the mind driving this work has more than recherché knowledge of current philosophical treatises on the Anthropocene, concepts are not simply dis-played nor applied, but organically unfold through a fragmented yet interwoven aesthetic. While the narrative of how we came to be in our present morass progresses through a teleological arc, beginning at birth to the grave, and working in tandem with evolving technological apparatuses that signal progress—from the industrial age of the steam engine and factory floor, to biotech, artificial intelligence, and beyond—each of the movements’ recombinant aesthetics offer its own specific tone and imagery. Simultaneously, select imagery randomly recurs throughout this one-hour requiem-like symphony of thought. The work loops backward and forward in time, utilising past and present images, always in consideration of a future, no matter how despairing; looping, juxtaposing, and recalibrating the archive to draw an ever-finer distinction between global histories and their lived inheritance, geo-cultural formations, and subjectivities. Akomfrah is fundamentally concerned with reflecting on the passage of time and the nonlinearity of history worked through and against an autobiographical narrative of lives lived (in the UK or Harlem); the inextricable but often disavowed linkages between colony and the metropole; the transnational experience of dispossession and the reclamation of a new space and novel claims on citizenship.
Info: Museu Coleção Berardo, Praça do Império, Lisbon, Duration: 8/11/18-11/3/19, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, http://en.museuberardo.pt
