Reflections on resistance with moments that make you gasp
John Akomfrah: The Unintended Beauty of Disaster
Lisson Gallery, NW1 ★★★★★
ENVELOPING, enthralling, sublime: Four Nocturnes (2019), the centrepiece of Lisson Gallery’s new show by the British artist John Akomfrah, is part of a trilogy of video installations that stands among the great bodies of art produced this century. Like Vertigo Sea (2015) and Purple (2017), it collages — or “choreographs”, as Akomfrah puts it — original and archival footage across three screens. It weaves together the big themes of our times — climate change, migration — with legacies of colonialism and slavery.
Elephants and their decline in Africa provide a leitmotif and symbol through Four Nocturnes — wandering across the vast, cracked desert earth; working in the logging industry; mourning their dead kin; and being captured as trophies in colonial hunting photographs. Meanwhile, young migrants roam the desert amid toppled pylons. Archival footage of pan-African heroes like the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba haunt the film. The imagery is impressionistic, impossible to consume at once, yet precise in its emotional impact: it’s an urgent appraisal of the causes and effects of humanitarian and environmental crises.
As well as photo and text works, Akomfrah shows Triptych (2020), a new film made amid the Black Lives Matter protests. It’s a study in portraiture: a series of black faces meet our gaze across the three screens. It follows the three-part structure of its soundtrack, the civil rights-themed jazz classic Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace, made by singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach in 1960.
Prayer begins slowly, Lincoln’s haunting notes allied to Akomfrah’s images of oceans, and the first lingering, beautiful portraits. In Protest, Akomfrah films people dancing, but their joyousness is made precarious by Lincoln’s screams, a raw, unforgettable moment. In Peace, Akomfrah shows us why. With Lincoln subdued and elegiac, a different kind of portrait appears: the Maryland mural of Breonna Taylor, the woman killed by police in March 2020. A stomach-punch moment in a brilliant reflection on resistance and precariousness. ⬤ Lisson Gallery NW1, until June 5. lissongallery.com