If there is one talent that I would trade for all others though, if I really had to pick one, I think he'd be him: John Akomfrah.
Ok, maybe I exclude the talents I've worked with and am too closed to, like Raoul Peck, who's a very good friend of Akomfrah's anyway. Just to be fair!
If you haven't seen any of his films, more artworks through video that simple "films" however, you must fix this gap!
John Akomfrah has now a new show at the Barbican Centre, in London, I mentioned it here a few moth ago: Purple.
John Akomfrah. Still frames from Purple, 2017. Six screen film installation
John Akomfrah
Purple
British artist and filmmaker, John Akomfrah creates his most ambitious piece to date - an immersive six-channel video installation addressing climate change, human communities and the wilderness.
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. 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 film and a hypnotic sound score to produce the video installation.
Winner of the 2017 Artes Mundi Prize.
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And here is what the Guardian has to say about it (extracts):
Link to read the whole article:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/01/john-akomfrah-purple-climate-change?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
John Akomfrah: ‘Progress can cause profound suffering’
For the British artist, global warming, the subject of his ambitious new video installation, is a process rooted in technology and exploitation
John Akomfrah grew up in the 1960s, in the shadow of Battersea power station in south London. As a child, he remembers “feeling as if I was enveloped in something whenever I played on the street. You could sense it in the air, you felt it and saw it, whatever was emanating from the huge chimneys. We were being poisoned as we played, but no one spoke about it. The conversations in the pub tended to be about football rather than carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Fifty years on, the local has become the global. Akomfrah’s latest art work, Purple, is an immersive, six-channel video installation that attempts to evoke the incremental effects of climate change on our planet. Shot in 10 countries and drawing on archive footage, spoken word and music alongside often epic shots of contemporary landscapes that have been altered by global warming and rising temperatures, Purple eschews a linear narrative for an almost overwhelming montage of imagery and sound.
Like all of Akomfrah’s work, it requires the viewer to surrender to sensory overload, while remaining alert to the often oblique connections being made throughout. “I kept thinking back, while making this work, to the local, working-class community I grew up in and how innocent we were in terms of trusting authority. One of the complex questions I am asking is about the relationship between our locality and the bigger issue of how we belong on the planet. Who can we trust with our collective future?”
(...)
More than once, Akomfrah describes Purple as “a response to Anthropocene”, the term coined by scientists for the geological age in which we are now living, a period defined by the influence of manmade activity on climate and the environment. A major source of inspiration for Purple is a 2013 book called Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Written by Timothy Morton, an English academic, it posits the idea that global warming is the most dramatic illustration of a “hyperobject” – an entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it baffles our traditional ways of thinking about it and, by extension, doing something about it.
(...)All these big themes are embedded in Purple, but may remain elusive to those unfamiliar with the tropes of conceptual art and experimental, non-narrative film-making. I was baffled, for instance, by recurring appearances of those mysterious silent figures who stand mute before often elemental landscapes on Alaska, Greenland and Skye. “In a very real way, I’m present in the film. I’m the figure in the brown shirt who gets rained on,” says Akomfrah, laughing. “It sounds a bit mystical, but for me everything starts with place. Wherever we filmed, it began with me asking the landscape the same question: ‘What can you tell me about the nature of climate change?’ As an artist and film-maker, I’m dependent on the responses I get from the environment.”
Is he aware, given the often bitterly contested nature of the public climate change debate, that a multiscreen, non-narrative conceptual art film that provides no answers may be greeted by a degree of scepticism, if not outright dismissal, from those on both sides demanding hard facts and evidence? “Well, I’m an artist. I make work for a gallery. I’m not attempting to make a science documentary. I’m coming at it from a different perspective by asking the question: what is philosophically, ethically and morally at stake here if we continue on this course? I don’t think you need to be licensed by the scientific community to ask that sort of question about the times we live in or to reflect on the anxiety many of us feel about the future of the planet. My son is old enough to become a father. On a purely personal level, it certainly felt like the right time for me as an artist to be asking these questions.”
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Purple is exhibited from 6 Oct to 7 Jan at the Curve, Barbican, London
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More of John Akomfrah's work:
The Stuart Hall Project (2013) - John Akomfrah (Trailer) | BFI
Published on 16 Aug 2013
The Stuart Hall Project (2013) - John Akomfrah (Trailer) | BFI. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/subscribetotheBFI
Released on BFI DVD on 20 January 2014
http://www.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/s...
A John Akomfrah film about revolution, politics, culture and the New Left experience.
Released on BFI DVD on 20 January 2014
http://www.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/s...
A John Akomfrah film about revolution, politics, culture and the New Left experience.
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