(Review by Russell/Image © Smoking Dogs Films courtesy of Lisson Gallery)
For the
best part of four decades John Akomfrah has been a key creative figure in the
world of film and video art. A founding member of the Black Audio Film
Collective, Akomfrah's practice includes a continuing interest in the culture
and representation of the black diaspora. At Baltic (Centre for Contemporary
Art) in Gateshead an exhibition opened today (July 6) focussing on three of the
artist's films.
Ballasts
of Memory comprises
three works - Precarity (2017), The Unfinished
Conversation (2012) and Psyche (2012) and it is Precarity which
caught the eye - and ear - of BSH. The subject of Akomfrah's film (46 mins 3
secs) is the legendary jazz musician Charles 'Buddy' Bolden. The mythical
figure of Bolden is seen across three screens in the three-channel HD video
installation. There is a stillness at the heart of this portrait of Bolden.
There is a noted absence of dialogue, the words we hear are the thoughts of a
fabled, troubled genius. Fragments of Uptown, Storyville and Preservation Hall
are seen in ghostly form, Bolden's distant horn occasionally rising above the
constant presence of running water. The parallel is there - the breached levees
of the Great Mississippi Flood (1927), the ongoing effects of Hurricane Katrina
(2005).
The
images are lasting, composed, we see Bolden incarcerated in the State Insane
Asylum in Jackson, Louisiana. Committed by the state, Bolden's schizophrenia,
and the authorities' attitude towards an ill black man in early twentieth
century America, resulted in the legendary jazz musician spending the last
twenty-five years of his life in what we, in the early part of the twenty-first
century, would call 'a secure unit'.
Precarity was commissioned for the
collection of the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, North Carolina.
Baltic, Gateshead is hosting its European premiere. The exhibition continues
until October 27.
No comments :
Post a Comment