John Akomfrah is a filmmaker and artist known for his deeply moving works which reflect on diaspora, colonialism, migration and identity. He was a founding member of the Black Film Audio Collective in 1982 in collaboration with seven fellow artists and had his directorial debut with the film Handsworth Songs (1986) about the 1985 Handsworth Riots. The collective created work that centred on the experiences of diasporic communities living in Britain amongst racial tension and political strife.
Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015) takes the ocean as its protagonist, meditating on the relationship between humanity and the sea. The three-channel film, originally made for the 2015 Venice Biennale, explores the sea as a character in slavery, migration and conflict. Akomfrah uses archival material, footage shot on the Isle of Skye, the Faroe Islands and Norway with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, as well as staged scenes. The result is an epic vision of political and ecological unrest. Scenes of breaching whales and natural beauty transition into news reports of migrants drowning at sea. Modern footage of the whaling industry segues into archival film of the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The film employs Akomfrah’s signature montage technique to integrate disparate scenes in a unifying vision of awe and terror.
A sensual, poetic and cohesive meditation on man’s relationship with the sea and the exploration of its role in the history of slavery, migration, environmental destruction and conflict, Vertigo Sea comes to Towner Eastbourne and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales with the context of both gallery’s location, situated on the coast. Vertigo Sea extends the way the museums represent artists’ film in their collections and underlines their ambition to acquire an internationally important collection of contemporary art.
