Sublime Seas: John Akomfrah and J. M. W. Turner (review)

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

—Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The sea is history.

—Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History”

John Akomfrah’s three-channel video installation Vertigo Sea (2015) debuted at the 56th Venice Biennale as part of Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures exhibition. In 2018, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) staged the United States’ premier of Vertigo Sea with the special exhibition Sublime Seas: John Akomfrah and J. M. W. Turner. The exhibit paired Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea with Turner’s painting The Deluge (1805), on loan from Tate London. The pairing of these two works, selected by Akomfrah, invokes a connection between the legacy of the sea and its relationship to the history of slavery, global migration, and present discourses around the refugee crisis. The exhibition at SFMOMA also facilitated an important conceptual connection between British nineteenth-century constructs of the sublime of the natural world with contemporary concerns around climate change and the seemingly irreversible impact of human abuses on the environment. Despite the thematic timeliness of this project, Akomfrah started working on the theme of the sea much earlier in 2007, an indication of the ideological richness that culminates with this exhibition.¹ Together, Turner’s painting and Akomfrah’s video installation explore themes of death, body memory, human rights atrocities, and environmental degradation—a range of difficult topics that did not seem to detour the significant number of visitors who saw this popular exhibition.

Born in Accra, Ghana, and based in London, Akomfrah is best known as the director of Smoking Dog Films and cofounder of the Black Audio Film Collective, founded in 1982 with fellow artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul. In the past few years, Akomfrah’s solo work has received many well-deserved tributes, including the 2016 solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London, the 2017 Artes Mundi prize in the United Kingdom, Apollo magazine’s 2018 Artist of the Year award, and the recent large-scale retrospective exhibition John Akomfrah: Signs of Empire hosted by the New Museum in New York.² Collectively, these accolades give more pronounced voice to Akomfrah’s powerful, wide-ranging work and provocative interventions in the logic and silences of the archive. From his early work with the Black Audio Film Collective to recent solo projects such as The Nine Muses (2010), a film-essay that adapts Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey to the history of mass migration from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia to post– World War II Britain, and The Stuart Hall Project (2013), a documentary on the famed Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, Akomfrah conceives of the archive as a “memory bank.” He raises important questions about how the archive creates a framework in relationship to lost and incomplete histories of the African diaspora.³ Akomfrah’s juxtapositions involving archival film, photographic materials, and text help to create new connections in order to recuperate narratives of the African diaspora in Europe and beyond, an innately activist practice in scope and character.

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015. Three-channel high definition color video installation, 7.1 sound, 48 minutes 30 seconds. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.

© Smoking Dogs Films

Visitors to the SFMOMA exhibition Sublime Seas entered a large, dark, cavernous gallery divided into two sections. To the left, in a long, narrow exhibition space, hung Turner’s The Deluge, dimly illuminated, significantly increasing the drama of the painting’s subject matter. A dramatic representation of a Biblical flood, surging water capsizes a vessel, violently sending bodies adrift; rapid winds and a dark looming wave predict disaster.⁴ Turner created a drawing and an etching version of the painting; in all three renditions there is a prominent black male figure who helps to support other bodies overtaken by the storm.⁵ His...