Date: 6 October 2017 – 7 January 2018 Where: Curve Gallery FREE
Experimental filmmaker John Akomfrah has been commissioned to create a new work for the Curve.
Akomfrah’s films are known for investigations into subjects like memory, identity, post-colonialism and often explore the experience of the African and Asian global diasporas. A founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982), his first film Handsworth Songs (1986) was a mournful meditation on the broken dreams of post war migrants told through a charged combination of archive footage, home movies, documentary photographs and newsreel footage of the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London.
Akomfrah’s standout work at last year’s Venice 56th Biennale was his paen to the ocean, Vertigo Sea (2015). A three-channel video installation comprising hundreds of hours of archival footage, edited with new tableaux vivants and a hypnotic sound score, Vertigo Sea focused on a range of histories from whaling, international migration, the trans Atlantic trade and the beginnings of globalisation.
