CV117 - John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea — Jill Glessing
Ciel variable 117 - Shifted (Summer 2021)
Focus (Individual Article, Digital Version)
The Design Exchange Trading Floor, Nuit Blanche, Toronto
Le 2 octobre 2016
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Du 10 février au 18 avril 2021
- Jill Glessing
The three-channel video Vertigo Sea offers an immersive and panoramic environment based on “a powerful montage” of still and moving images, as well as juxtaposed and superimposed sounds, including music, recordings of nature, songs, and texts read by off-screen voices. The narrative proposed by John Akomfrah makes the ocean, “site of history, of beauty and bounty,” into “a scene of disaster.” “Human forces” have provoked this transformation, as shown in a succession of images that evoke slavery and water pollution. Despite references to Géricault, Turner, Friedrich, Melville, and Woolf, the work, writes Jill Glessing, “prompts viewers to consider their own contemporary relationship with the savagery perpetrated within and against that watery paradise.”
Details
Language: French & English
Digital Version: PDF, 788 Kb
Bibliographical Reference
Jill Glessing, « John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea », Ciel variable, no 117, Montréal, 2021, p. 86-87.