John Akomfrah, On the Verge
John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015, video installation.
When I get to the New Museum’s survey exhibition of John Akomfrah’s work, “Signs of Empire,” I find myself lying on the floor, a bootleg antianxiety trick I’ve been practicing over the past few weeks in many places: on the hardwood floors of a friend’s apartment, the cold vinyl of my kitchen floors, the mat at the university gym, the bathroom tiles of a church basement. The supine position opens up the thorax, where the heart and lungs live. With the back half of my body in contact with the floor, I am obliged to acknowledge that the ground has not fallen beneath me. In Akomfrah’s sensorium, I feel sonic vibrations thumping up my spine. I would rather feel nothing at all.
Vertigo Sea, Akomfrah’s three-screen HD work originally made for the 2015 Venice Biennale and re-presented at the New Museum, is mesmerizing. The viewer should not be able to look away. But an anxious mind does not rest: minutes after watching the film, I pull out my phone, eyes averted. Every smartphone user and exec who pays good money to “unplug” knows that small screens, too, can overwhelm.
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The New Museum exhibition, which closed at the end of the summer, borrows its name from (1983), the first production of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC). Active from 1982 to 1998, BAFC was a group of black British artists and filmmakers that included Akomfrah, who was born in Accra and raised in south London,
