[Winter 2024]

By Ariane Noël de Tilly

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
23.11.2022 — 7.01.2024

[Excerpt]

Like Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings featuring a traveller, a monk, or a handful of people painted from the back looking out at a grandiose landscape – Moonrise over the Sea (1822), for example – the Ghanaian-British artist John Akomfrah’s video installation Purple (2017) presents individuals in front of striking vistas. However, whereas nineteenth-century Romantic painters considered contemplation of nature to be a form of self-discovery, Akomfrah broadens the view and invites us to a different observation: that of the damage wrought by industrialization on the environment and human life. To document the upheaval of ecosystems on a planetary scale, Akomfrah set his camera tripod down in ten different cities and countries, from rural Scotland to Mumbai, from Greenland to the Marquesas Islands. Adding to his rich range of cases, Akomfrah also selected numerous film clips, some dating from the 1940s, conserved in the archives of the British Film Institute and the Natural History Museum of London. So, Purple is a work that testifies to the stages of the industrial era and takes us through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in thematic, rather than chronological, order…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: John Akomfrah, Purple – Ariane Noël de Tilly ]