John Akomfrah’s installation ‘The Unfinished Conversation’ in Warwick Arts Center, Coventry (GB), January 17 untill March 7.
About: The Unfinished Conversation, 2012
The film examines the nature of the visual as triggered across the individual’s memory landscape, with particular reference to identity and race. In it, academic Stuart Hall’s memories and personal archives are extracted and relocated in an imagined and different time, reflecting the questionable nature of memory itself. This multi-layered three-screen installation investigates the theory that identity is not an essence or being but instead a becoming, where individual subjectivities are formed in both real and fictive spaces.
Stuart Hall is a Jamaican cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the UK since 1951. He was President of the British Sociological Association from 1995-1997.
The Stuart Hall Project, is the single-screen mainstream version of the installation:
Antinuclear campaigner, New Left activist and founding father of Cultural Studies, this documentary interweaves 70 years of Stuart Hall’s film, radio and television appearances, and material from his private archive to document a memorable life and construct a portrait of Britain’s foremost radical intellectual.
I did come across one review on the Telegraph’s website by Mark Hudson who really loved the Liverpool Biennial 3 screen-version of the work, calling it a beautiful and moving film about Stuart Hall.
Here’s s snip:
Akomfrah’s film stands out as a work of substance that says important things about what Britain has become over the last half century. If Hall isn’t quite a household name, much less an ackowledged national treasure, this film will convince you he should be both. Unfolding simultaneously over three screens, it evokes the colonial Jamaica in which he grew up and the cold, foggy Britain to which he came as a student to Oxford in 1951. But what really illuminates the experience is Hall’s keen intelligence and patent decency, as he expounds in his gently musical voice on his discovery of personal and ethnic identity. Hall, the darkest-skinned member of an aspiring middle-class Jamaican family of mixed Portuguese-Jewish, African and English descent, felt an outsider even in his own home as a child, and no less alienated as a student at Oxford among the British upper classes. It was only when, in 1968, he turned a mental corner and decided to define himself as black, as opposed to merely West Indian, that Hall achieved a degree of equanimity.
The Unfinished Conversation is funded by Grants For Arts, Arts Council England and supported by the Bluecoat, New Art Exchange, Nottingham and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, Royal College Inspire Programme and Akomfrah’s own Smoking Dogs Films Production company.
Quotes from article Tambay A. Obenson | Shadow and Act, December 3, 2012.