John-Akomfrah, Katharina sits in Field. From Peripetetia (2012)© John Akomfram. Co-produced by Carroll/Fletcher and the European Cultural Foundation, 2012
Artist, lecturer and writer John Akomfrah is best known as the co-founder of the imaginative Black Audio Film Collective, in 1982, and for his incisive, mesmerising abstract film works with a series of independent film and television production companies for the past 15 years, including his current Smoking Dogs Films group.
Akomfrah strives to give a voice and visual presence to descendants of the African Diaspora in Europe, using historical archives to devise film essays and fictional works capturing a sense of displacement.
In Hauntologies, he dwells on disappearance, memory and death in typically moving style. His first show for Carroll/Fletcher features three previously unseen video, sound and installation works, including Peripeteia, a short film based on two portraits believed to be the earliest western representations of black people, drawn by Albrecht Dürer during the 16th century.
Each morphs into a moorland landscape, evoking something of the presence of death repeated in At the Graveside of Tarkovsky, a sound installation inspired by the operatic soundtracks of 20th century Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
Three ghostly films form his essay, Psyche, which possesses a lineage of imagined biographies: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc was a silent French film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach chronicled a fake journal written by Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, and Winstanley, a 1975 film by Kevin Brownlow, starred a social reformer attempting to form a self-sufficient community in Surrey.
Between them, these new and recent pieces reveal Akomfrah's obsession with film archives and the thoroughness of his practice.
- Carroll/Fletcher, Eastcastle Street, London. Open 11am-7pm (6pm Saturday, closed Sunday). Admission free. Follow the gallery on Twitter @carrollfletcher.
More pictures:
At the Graveside of Tarkovsky (2012). Installation© Courtesy John Akomfrah / Carroll/Fletcher
The Call of Mist - Redux (2012). HD video, colour, sound. A Smoking Dogs Films Production commissioned by Illuminations TV for the BBC© Courtesy John Akomfrah / Carroll/Fletcher
Psyche (2012). Three-channel video installation, looped© Courtesy John Akomfrah / Carroll/Fletcher
Allegories of Mourning (2012). C-type prints on paper, wooden frame© Courtesy John Akomfrah / Carroll/Fletcher
Peripeteia (2012). HD video, colour, sound. A Smoking Dogs Films Production in association with Carroll/Fletcher and the European Cultural Foundation© Courtesy John Akomfrah / Carroll/Fletcher
