until 31 Mar 19
Mesmerising as all his triptychs;
A direct, mystical comment on the participation and sacrifice of Commonwealth ‘subjects’ during European conflict. A sacrifice mostly forgotten.
The women in the film, the chorus, disapproving, knowing, abandoned, hurt, widows, mothers without sons, for which, as it is said, no known word exists in any language; all that, for a possibly
superfluous cause.
Movements slow, if any. The soldiers are already dead, tired.
Tired.
In waiting.
They are in limbo. They are now all equal and all together.
Tired.
Dead.
Their costumes, outfits, uniforms, immaculate, as I guess you would be in the afterlife. Tired. Dead. Alone, though together, abysmally, alone.
Akomfrah, years now, has created a whole genre of itself. Recognisable, addictive, otherworldly yet skin close political.
The school girl next to me, came in with her class, made to do so, she had a giant swirling lollipop she was enjoying; I thought, do they still make those! Studiously she was involved with her swirling treat while slowly she started watching, the loud sounds she was making, getting all and more less frequent until she was hardly bothered with her treat because she was watching. I felt like smiling. I was so thrilled that this abstract, eternally slow to some, installation would absorb her.
Water. Water running over memories, over objects, a recurring theme in his work, we cannot be cleansed, we can not forget. Memory can be viewed under the haze of time, but a death is still a death. Thousands of deaths. For what?
The cost of a commonwealth person’s grave from the two world wars is C$85 per year. There are proper accounts and budgets for it and an organisation running it that started with decent, I guess, for the circumstances, intentions. And nice signs in the commonwealth cemeteries like the one in Wandsworth. Isn't that nice.
The video installation is, explicitly commenting on the death and absence war creates, especially for people that got involved by proxy. I thought that that was quite admirable of the Imperial War Museum to host this installation at its own accord.
Until I went to the museum’s shop out of curiosity. War itself, and its machines are celebrated more than what I expected, a take on human perseverance during war time. Products targeting kids, spitfires, machines of war. Churchill as a impeccable hero figure. Merchandise accordingly. A man that advocated and administered chemical weapons attacks, sold to kids as a funky merchandised cool guy. Spitfires. You can make your own. It also sells swirling lollipops. British. The IWM shop is trivialising war, trivialising pain, death and undermines the museums own effort to a reflective, modern stance. It is always under query what the museum’s objective is, even its own name still. But it is indisputable that the shop is unforgivably nationalistic, pro-war and insensitive in my view.
C$85, per grave.
Back in the video installation, suddenly, the soldiers, dead, step inside their own memories or limbos or heavens or hells or heads, inside rooms resembling art gallery rooms, in an extremely magnificent, inspired twist in the imagery. Reminding us also how safe we are, us, sitting in a gallery room watching this, from what is depicted in actual footage and current symbolic filming.
And the objects in those rooms and films become fetishised, in the sense of carriers of life and memory. The ghost visitor has no access to them, cannot touch them, cannot feel them. They are exhibits to his former self. A self that war destroyed irrevocably.
C$85
‘’I moored alone with this fable,
if it’s true that it is a fable,
if it’s true that mortals will not again take up
the old deceit of the gods;
if it’s true
that in future years some other Teucer,
or some Ajax or Priam or Hecuba,
or someone unknown and nameless who nevertheless saw
a Scamander overflow with corpses,
isn’t fated to hear
messengers coming to tell him
that so much suffering, so much life,
went into the abyss
all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.’’
more info:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/mimesis-african-soldier
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/01/john-akomfrah-purple-climate-change An update 01/03/19:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/ex-head-of-british-army-backs-compensation-for-african-wwii-veterans
Though not as rich and brutal as the Tate Liverpool exhibition last year, this is still a most interesting free exhibit of German interwar troublesome paintings accompanied by coherent contextually rich captions. Though, also preserved in a safe bottle of family viewing and political self righteousness. Images that would had been shaking are now by default accepted as ‘the right side of history’. Perhaps a comment on contemporary fascist narratives, contemporary wording and contemporary conflicts inter-state and intra-state might be interesting and fundamental in waking us up from our historical soporific view of the past.
We are still blind to the current shellshocked soldier, the current widow, the current prostitute out of destitution, the abducted raped bride, the 5p on the pavement that we never thought we’d bother pick up and now we excitedly do. We do not see the man following young mothers out of trams shouting ‘you are in England, you should speak fucking English’ as happened to my friend last week. Cause these are paintings safely pinned on walls and safely protected by their captions and preserved by time. You leave the exhibition upset, maybe; but definitely feeling you are not one of them. The ones from the past we spit on now. Not one of them. But no-one ever thinks they are.
more info:
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/magic-realism
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