Purple

For over three decades British artist, writer, theorist, and film director John Akomfrah has been examining the politics of race, identity, and post-colonial approaches. His most recent cinematic installations, Vertigo Sea, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and Purple (2017), are the first two works in a planned quartet addressing the aesthetics and politics of matter. While Vertigo Sea was a historical tribute to the ocean – devoted to topics including the histories of whaling, international migration, the trans-Atlantic trade, and globalization –Purple delves into climate change and its effects on human communities, biodiversity, and the wilderness.

True to his past approaches, Akomfrah draws on hundreds of hours of archival footage, here of disappearing landscapes: from the hinterlands of Alaska to Arctic Greenland and the volcanic Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. The artist understands archival documentation to be a memory bank, connected to the mortality of people and places. Images, figures, and moments are captured because the filmmaker, whether artist or amateur, seeks to make them immortal, a quality that is enshrined in our psyche and is the ultimate function of documentation. Through the vibrant, multi-layered visuals of Purple, Akomfrah sets a dialog in motion exploring the irreversible impact of human activity.

–Alicia Reuter