Review

Ravishing reminders of what we all stand to lose - Purple, John Akomfrah, Barbican Curve, review

Purple
Credit: Anthony Harvey

Grand scale suits John Akomfrah’s work well. After the pummelling majesty of Vertigo Sea (2015) – a three-screen work exploring death by water – his more modest enterprises felt unsatisfying. On a single screen, Akomfrah can’t create the torrent of lush, jarring images that made Vertigo Sea at once beguiling and unsettling. An hour long, and stretched over six screens in the Barbican’s Curve gallery, Purple sees Akomfrah back in his element.

    Conceived as a companion piece to Vertigo Sea, Purple opens with the sound of trickling water: a Highland stream slowly dissolves scattered photographs in a horribly timely suggestion of devastating flood. Where the earlier work wove together stories of migration, totalitarianism and the transatlantic slave trade, Purple focuses more explicitly on human impact on the environment.

    Divided into six “movements”, each titled against a plain purple backdrop, the film charts ways in which the desire for energy, food, travel, weaponry and consumer goods has caused damage not only to the earth, but also to our physical and mental health.

    Purple
    John Akomfrah's Purple exhibition at The Curve, Barbican

    Curving round to the very limits of peripheral vision, it’s impossible to watch all six screens of Purple at once, which forces an active kind of viewing. Beautifully restored and converted archival film, ranging from snippets of British New Wave cinema to newsreels and scientific documentaries, flicker in and out of this collage of moving images. New footage, shot in disappearing landscapes in Greenland, Alaska, volcanic islands in the South Pacific and at various sites around the UK, is sublime (in an intentionally Burkean sense).

    Akomfrah’s camera loves big, watery landscapes and brooding skies. We follow a team of dogs speeding along a glacier; linger on the tropical lushness of Tahiti; dip into a bluebell-swart churchyard. Alongside, we hear Alaska’s native territories being auctioned off to oil companies, and see crops plastered with pesticides before being fed to cattle. Wastewater is pumped into rivers and the air filled with toxic emissions as Britons, post rationing, enjoy the miracle of abundant food and affordable clothing.

    Linking back to earlier works The Nine Muses and Mnemosyne (both 2012), Akomfrah stations figures in hooded jackets within the landscapes as witnesses to eroding history. Like the footage itself, they’re a reminder that we know all of this already, we just chose not to see it when it becomes inconvenient or discomforting to do so. By contrast, imagery relating to dance – from waltzes to tribal ritual, flamenco to disco – seems to represent humanity at its best, in joyous commune.

    Purple
    Credit: Anthony Harvey

      At points, the work becomes ‘purple’ to the point of manipulative. There’s a build of emotive, Philip Glass-esque piano music and weepy footage, particularly toward the end, and the installation of suspended plastic oil canisters and a pile of rubber car tyres within the Curve feels like overkill (or perhaps a way of filling unused space).

      Purple doesn’t need any of this. Akomfrah drives home his concerns with compelling clarity, sparking off chains of association that are grimly disturbing while offering a reminder of all the beauty that we stand to lose.

      John Akomfrah: Purple, The Curve, Barbican, until Jan 7. Details: barbican.org.uk

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