His latest work, titled Peripeteia, premiered at the Toronto Interntational Film Festival earlier this month, and British/Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah's is already tackling his next one.
Thanks to Bombastic Element for the link… Akomfrah has been commissioned by Autograph ABP to direct a new film titled The Unfinished Conversation.
Autograph ABP is a charity that works internationally to educate the public in photography, by addressing issues of cultural identity and human rights.
Here's how they describe The Unfinished Conversation:
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 (of Indian and British descent) 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 completed work will premier at the Liverpool Biennial 2012, which runs through November 25. The Biennial presents work by 242 artists in 27 locations. The festival takes place in galleries, museums and other sites, and includes a dynamic program of talks, events, screenings and other activities.
The project 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.
We should be getting a recap of his Peripeteia film, post-TIFF, which imagines the lives of a black man and woman who appear in a sixteenth-century drawing by German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer.