John Akomfrah’s THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION, his documentary masterpiece about Stuart Hall —the summer highlight of MOMA‘s Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection exhibition—will screen through July 30.
This three-channel video installation in its own dedicated “cinema” has been drawing crowds who tend to stay for the entire running-time and then watch it again.
From Adrian Searle’s Guardian review after CONVERSATION’s first appearance in 2012:
“The best work in the [Liverpool] biennial is undoubtedly Akomfrah’s THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION, a three-screen video based on the life, work and talk of the incomparable Jamaican-born thinker Stuart Hall. Much more than biopic, Akomfrah juxtaposes archive news footage, readings of William Blake, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf and most of all Hall’s own voice, to describe the world’s tumbling. Hall’s thoughts about identity, immigration and selfhood, evolve through a roar of telling images. The film, like the essence of Hall’s work, is about the conundrum of being in the world, and is as unexpected as it is brilliant.”*
moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3651?locale=en
*theguardian.com/uk/2012/sep/14/liverpool-biennial-2012-exhibition-space
John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation (2012). Three-screen installation, HD video, color, sound, 45 mins (detail of still).
Courtesy the artist, the Warwick Arts Centre, and Carroll Fletcher.
