Review of the exhibition of the classic of contemporary British art John Akomfrah at the Frankfurt Schirn Kunsthalle

The Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is showing an exhibition of the classic of contemporary British art, John Akomfrah, “Space of Empathy”. This year the author will represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Tells Alexey Mokrousov.

A rare exhibition, formally consisting of only three exhibits, can not only create the effect of a meteorite in the established museum landscape, but also force the viewer to come again. The organizers of John Akomfrah’s Space of Empathy in Frankfurt am Main encourage this: they suggest using the entrance ticket twice. The mercy of the Schirn Kunsthalle is justified – the exhibits are three video installations lasting three hours, it’s not very convenient to watch them at once, and in the neighboring halls they show a large retrospective of Lionel Feininger (about which see “Kommersant” on January 10), immerse yourself in two large exhibitions impossible in one visit.

66-year-old John Akomfrah – who can now be called “Sir John” and has been knighted for his services to British art – is a one-man band. As is customary in the modern art world, he is not only an artist, but also a screenwriter, film director, theorist and curator. And also a political thinker, essentially a publicist in the skin of an artist. A native of the Ghanaian capital Accra, where his family was forced to leave for England in the 1960s for political reasons, Akomfrah studied at the University of Plymouth. Encyclopedias characterize him as an “anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist.” Now in front of the cinema halls there are stands with books about “red Africa”, with publications by Benjamin and Noam Chomsky.

You can leaf through them or at least photograph the covers, but even if you walk through the library halls without delay, you will not be able to escape the themes of global migration and the legacy of colonialism, the destruction of the usual habitat and environmental disaster; Akomfrah’s films tell about this emotionally, but without forced pathos, corrosively, but without being boring. Impressive in its filming and terrifying in some scenes of the killing of whales and bears, the film “Vertigo Sea” (Vertigo Sea, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015) is dedicated to the relationship between man and nature; unfolding on five screens, Becoming Wind (2023; premiered at the last Sharjah Biennale) looks like an expanded poetic metaphor, simultaneously uniting the wind of the Haitian slave revolution of the late 18th century, the narrative of the French Revolution that inspired it, and the Garden of Eden lost by humanity.

The Unfinished Conversation (2012) tells the story of the influential public intellectual Stuart Hall (1934–2014), a sociologist and cultural theorist, a scholar of the legacy of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, and a consistent critic of the imperial and colonial. A native of Jamaica, Hall once won a scholarship to study at Oxford, where, in the stronghold of European culture, he encountered manifestations of racism and xenophobia. The traumatic experience is also reflected in Akomfrah’s film, which is structured not only as a biography with extensive writing by the scholar himself, but also as a portrait of the times, including the hippie movement, the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s and the political upheaval of the 1980s. The man inside the story is not a plot for the casual visitor, but it is in the hall where “An Unfinished Conversation” is shown that there is usually the largest audience.

In Russia, Hall was translated sporadically; he never took a full-fledged place in our intellectual landscape. But Akomfrah, although this year he will participate in the Venice Biennale for the third time – this time he is given the British pavilion – is also not popular everywhere. For all his political acuity, Akomfrah, who creates impressive artistic images, is considered a classic in the English-speaking art world, but is poorly known in France or Germany. His exhibitions ranged from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to London’s Tate Britain, where “Unfinished Conversation” was shown for six months, from Toronto to Lisbon, but it was shown little in Central European countries, traditionally considered the stronghold of the political in art. Although the aesthetics of the Black Audio Film Collective, of which Akomfrah was one of the founders in 1982, were distinguished by an interest in working with archival photographs, fragments of old television news and video footage – everything that forms the basis of his subsequent work. Experimental aesthetics were combined here with a critical view of the situation of blacks in Britain; the ideas of the same Hall and one of the authors of postcolonial theory, Homi Baba, were key for the project participants.

Perhaps Akomfra’s fate would have turned out differently in Russia. Four years ago, at the Garage exhibition “The Coming World: Ecology as a New Politics. 2030–2100” showed his video installation on six screens “Purple” (2018); there is a recording of his public lecture in Moscow online. As a resident of the “garage” program “Field Research,” Akomfrah worked in film archives, selected one and a half thousand newsreels and fragments of documentaries, one way or another connected with the national question in the USSR, with the Bolshevik utopia of the consolidation of the nation. For the author, this was part of his family biography: not only Angola and Mozambique, but also Ghana participated in the anti-colonial struggle, and the Soviet Union supported it in this. All this threatened to result in another large-scale video project, the premiere of which would certainly have taken place in Moscow, but history decreed otherwise, once again showing the artist who proposes and who disposes.