John Akomfrah

A conversation with filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, exploring how his work with montage can be understood to articulate contemporaneity in sensuous ways. Taking the form of a conversation with filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, this book sets out to explore how Akomfrah's work with montage can be understood to articulate contemporaneity in sensuous ways. In multilayered video installations, sequences of images are forced into the same time and space, allowing the viewer to experience connections in her/his/their present. With examples from many of his key works, topics discussed include untold histories and the diaspora, migration, and "the enigma of arrival." Akomfrah defines his way of working with montage not only as a technique but as an ethic, an ontology in which differences are brought together.

The films of John Akomfrah represent one of the most significant bodies of artistic production in the post-war era in Britain, yet little attempt has been made to analyse the consistencies and divergences across them. James Harvey's John Akomfrah is the first comprehensive analytic engagement with these films, offering sustained close engagement with the artist's core thematic preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies. His analysis negotiates the contextual and theoretical layers of Akomfrah's rich and complex films, from the intermedial diaspora aesthetics of Handsworth Songs (1986) to the intersectional spatial ecopolitics of Purple (2017). Positioning Akomfrah in the burgeoning black British arts and cultural scene of the 1980s as a member of Black Audio Film Collective, Harvey traces the evolution of a critical relationship with the postcolonial archive in his early films, through analysis of documentaries made for television in the 1990s and up to more recent film installations in museums and galleries.

This catalog is the first monographic publication to survey the work of London-based artist John Akomfrah (born 1957) and accompanies his upcoming New Museum exhibition. Since the early 1980s, Akomfrah's moving image works have offered some of the most rigorous and expansive reflections on the culture of the black diaspora. Zoe Whitley and Aram Moshayedi survey Akomfrah's early work as part of Black Audio Film Collective. Tina Campt explores the sonic resonances of Akomfrah's installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012), which focuses on the life of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Diana Nawi examines the recent work Transfigured Night (2013/2018), considering how Akomfrah continues to find new languages for film, representation and narrative. T.J. Demos and Okwui Enwezor look at Vertigo Sea (2015), Akomfrah's monumental work exploring the concept of the black Atlantic, using the work to articulate the visual and philosophical underpinnings of Akomfrah's work across his career.

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator contemporary art refer to? What constitutes the present present or the contemporary contemporary? Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art, the first book in the Contemporary Condition series, introduces key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present and calls for a deep rethinking of the structures of temporalization.

An exploration of how contemporary art reframes and humanizes migration, calling for coexistence—the recognition of the interdependence of beings. In Art for Coexistence, art historian Christine Ross examines contemporary art’s response to migration, showing that art invites us to abandon our preconceptions about the current “crisis”—to unlearn them—and to see migration more critically, more disobediently. We (viewers in Europe and North America) must come to see migration in terms of coexistence: the interdependence of beings. The artworks explored by Ross reveal, contest, rethink, delink, and relink more reciprocally the interdependencies shaping migration today—connecting citizens-on-the-move from some of the poorest countries and acknowledged citizens of some of the wealthiest countries and democracies worldwide. These installations, videos, virtual reality works, webcasts, sculptures, graffiti, paintings, photographs, and a rescue boat, by artists including Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Laura Waddington, Tania Bruguera, and others, demonstrate art’s power to mediate experiences of migration. Ross argues that art invents a set of interconnected calls for more mutual forms of coexistence: to historicize, to become responsible, to empathize, and to story-tell. Art history, Ross tells us, must discard the legacy of imperialist museology—which dissocializes, dehistoricizes, and depoliticizes art. It must reinvent itself, engaging with political philosophy, postcolonial, decolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies, and critical refugee and migrant studies.

Across three decades the American artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, USA) has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race.Jafa's work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop a specifically Black visual aesthetics equal to the 'power, beauty and alienation' of Black music in American culture?Building upon Jafa's image-based practice, this enormous new volume comprises a series of visual sequences that are cut and juxtaposed across its pages. The artist has been collecting and working from a set of source books since the 1990s, seeking to trace and map unwritten histories and narratives relating to black life.Punctuating this visual material is a series of commissioned texts partnered with a rich compendium of essays, short stories and poetry that has informed Jafa's artistic practice and which together form an unprecedented resource.With over 30 contributors including: art critic Dave Hickey, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, award-winning British artist John Akomfrah, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als.Published after the exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at Serpentine Galleries, London (8 June - 10 September 2017), and at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (11 February - 25 November 2018).

Culture is defined in its broadest sense and areas covered include architecture, consumerism, education, ethnicity and belief, fashion and design, film and cinema, gender and family, intellectual life, literature, media, music, performing arts, politics and society, recreation, sport, video and television, visual arts, and youth culture."--Jacket.