Bluecoat

Visit: 1st October & 3rd October

"John Akomfrah’s newly commissioned film, The Unfinished Conversation, 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. (The film starts at 5 minutes past every hour in Gallery 2.  Duration: 45 minutes)." - Taken from the Bluecoat website

The visit to the Bluecoat was primarily to be given a short tour and informed briefly of the history, which was really interesting. I liked that the staff seemed to be really proud and concerned with the heritage of the building. After the visit was over we were encouraged to watch Akomfrah's film, "The Unfinished Conversation" (2012). I had to watch it in two sittings because I was pushed for time in my first. 

The film itself had a lot of similarities to what I had done on an art course previously; working with found and original footage, using a triptych of projections and overlapping sounds. I was really excited to watch the film, but I felt very uneasy about it quite quickly. It's based on the life Stuart Hall, whose theories of re-presentation and the media are famous, and I was already familiar with some. I didn't know all of the intimate details about his family however.

The thing I liked most about the film was the "found" footage of the eras, starting with black and white 1950s and moving through the ages. I also enjoyed the subject matter, I think it's fascinating how immigrants came to the UK and had to deal with awful prejudices and transitions in lifestyle. The thing I didn't like however, were the sequences that Akomfrah had clearly made recently. At one point there was a voice-over of Stuart Hall talking about how his sister had undergone electric shock treatment and never recovered. This was accompanied by the visuals of some tatty clothes on a hanger on a branch in a bleak forest. To me, this seemed very twee, cringey and A Level Fine Art student. It possessed no real imagination or creativity and made me cringe to think such a serious and delicate matter could be depicted in such a toe-curling way. I also didn't like the badly photo-shopped images of Hall's family. The images themselves were obviously fine, but Akomfrah had stuck them over an image of a frame on a sideboard in a house, and repeatedly failed to line the images up successfully so it looked like a bad cut and paste job. I thought for such an intelligent theorist and fascinating story, it was unpleasant to see the slap-dash elements of the film and I would have just preferred if it was past footage edited together rather than trying to be "edgy" or have poignant little scenes that were detrimental to the piece as a whole.

Taken from "www.liverpoolbiennial.co.uk"