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The British-Ghanaian artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah creates moving image works that dramatize challenging political subjects and elevate their visual explorations to a monumental, cinematic scale. As a cofounder (with David Lawson and Lina Gopaul) of the Black Audio Film Collective and the production company Smoking Dogs Films, Akomfrah is renowned for dynamic, symphonic films, which comment on the relationship between empire, colonialism, and capitalism in our present times.

Following his acclaimed documentaries of Stuart Hall, civil rights movements in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the history of jazz and blues, Akomfrah’s most recent multi-channel video installations have turned to the problem of the Anthropocene (the current phase of environmental and ecological time in which human industry has irrevocably altered the natural world). Purple, the second of a trilogy of works (bookended by Vertigo Sea [2015] and Four Nocturnes [2019]), charts the effect of climate change on human communities, biodiversity, and the wilderness. Told across six interwoven movements, Akomfrah produced the film by combining archival media with new footage of endangered or threatened ecosystems, from the hinterlands of Alaska and the desolate environments of Greenland, to the Tahitian peninsula and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. Presented as a series of lush, slow-moving, long takes stitched with found film clips and images from the 1940s to the present day, Purple forms a visually dense and cinematically immersive collage of images and sounds that reflects on the delicate relationship between humans and the planet.

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The central focus of the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary work of William Kentridge is the prolonged effects of colonialism in South Africa, more specifically the National Party’s (a.k.a., the Afrikaner National Party) inhumane and discriminatory apartheid system. Across a diverse range of media, from drawing, performance, and film, to opera and theatrical productions, Kentridge reanimates painful histories and the paradoxes of colonialism—“what we’ve chosen not to remember,” as he says.

KABOOM! is a monumental, three-channel work projected onto a scale model of the stage from Kentridge’s tour-de-force performance The Head & the Load, which premiered at Tate London before being presented at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Set to a rousing, orchestral score composed by Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi, KABOOM! tells the story of the nearly two million African porters and carriers used by the British, French, and Germans during World War I. Employing his trademark multidisciplinary approach and his signature trope of the procession, Kentridge builds up dynamic layers of drawings, moving images, and texts projected over top of sculptural paper props to embody the dramatic arc and theatrical intensity of The Head & the Load at gallery scale. The title of the work comes from a Ghanaian proverb that reads, “the head and the load are the troubles of the neck,” and the porters in KABOOM! shoulder the physical load transported all across Africa. As the work suggests, they are the ones who ultimately bare the historical legacy of colonialism and war.

KABOOM! is a major acquisition, adding one of the most important contemporary artists to the collection. This work joins other major room-filling works by Ragnar Kjartansson, Steve McQueen, and Kara Walker, and advances the ICA’s priority and commitment to diversify the collection with artists of the Global South.

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In a collaborative practice begun in 2013, Brazilian photojournalist Bárbara Wagner and German-born Irish artist Benjamin de Burca create video and installation works that explore contemporary histories of underground dance and musical genres. Initially trained in journalism and fine arts, respectively, their prolific moving image works have centered on urban subcultures in the South Atlantic diaspora, from the Franco-Indo creole musical genre maloya to frevo dancers and brega singers in Recife, Brazil, where the artists live and work. Their approach merges the cinematic with the fictional, documentary, and ethnographic to address questions of surveillance, visibility, and creativity in an increasingly connected, postcolonial world.

A representative example of their acclaimed collaborative approach, Swinguerra focuses on disadvantaged queer communities of color in Recife, with an emphasis on transgender and nonbinary performers. The film features three contemporary dance styles—swingueira, brega funk, and passinho da maloca—as performed by the competitive dance groups Cia; Extremo; Grupo La Mafia; and Bonde do Passinho/As do Passinho S.A. These mixed dance styles recall Brazil’s colonial history and the slave trade, where music and dance functioned as discreet methods of organizing politically under an oppressive state. With a nod to this history, the two-channel video, which takes its title from a blending of the words “swingueira” (the dance style) and “guerra” (“war” in both Portuguese and Spanish), frames its subjects and its viewers in opposing yet not antagonistic positions. Rather, the dual screen installation echoes the dance battle’s call-and-response form of public address, set to the rhythmic stylings of Brazilian hip-hop. Fast-paced, athletic, sexy, dreamlike, and aggressive, the dance styles, like the music, make Swinguerra an exhilarating and unforgettable viewing experience and illustrates how dance and music offer rich sources of agency, resistance, and community for marginalized subjects.

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