Softly amorphous: John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation
originally written in autumn 2017
TUCKED DEEP IN THE CONCRETE BELLY of the old power station, I watch a narrative across three screens. Except I don’t just watch. John Akomfrah’s visual installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012) demands active immersion. And if there is a narrative, it’s tangled. Not really a biography of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Akomfrah’s installation laces together different media to examine Hall’s life and work: a meditation, then, one that includes broader notions of race, identity, journeys, urban Britain, and the social forces that sweep all folk along.
To describe Akomfrah’s installation as material fragmented between three screens suggests the material has a single source, but The Unfinished Conversation makes no such claim. Hall once suggested that identity is not an essence but a constant flow, affected by time and circumstance. The Unfinished Conversation mimics his idea, offering multiple perspectives of the same story in continuous dialogue, interweaving but ultimately moving in the same direction. The diversity of forms — from radio interviews to archival footage, personal photographs, jazz, literature, and purposely shot footage — is intentional. Their fluidity allows the viewer to ‘build connective tissue between characters, events, histories, and stories,’ Akomfrah explains. This emphasis on form forges new relationships with the content, creating ‘a frisson, a charge between the art and its “outside”’.
Played on a loop in the Tate, only serendipitous timing allows a conventional beginning-to-end viewing of The Unfinished Conversation. So when I enter the dark space at a random point during the film, I can’t place myself within the narrative. I’m struck by a sense of agency: as the viewer, I unwittingly mark the beginning and end of Akomfrah’s piece. Here lies a tension between documentary film as objective information vs documentary film as art. It’s important, Akomfrah says, ‘to read images in the archive for their ambiguity and open-endedness’. He uses archival footage to create a malleable narrative that encourages participation. The resulting dialogue between the viewer’s experience and wider social realities mirrors a tenet central to both Akomfrah and Hall: the dynamic between peripheral perspectives and a central whole.
For as The Unfinished Conversation unfolds, three-fold, before me, I’m forced to confront how I experience and process information. To my left, birds swirl about a field at sunset. To my right, Miles Davis blows into a trumpet. Between the two, Hall debates the definition of ‘British’ on a BBC panel show. How these differing perspectives are related is never explained: that’s the viewer’s job. Some continuities, like the jazz score, temper the disordered visuals to avoid total entropy. The viewer reaches just the right level of attention, following and deciphering the information presented without surrendering to complete abstraction.
Yet the material always follows three trains of thought rather than one straightforward narrative. I notice I’m biased towards one screen, and I think about how humans deal with complex, contradictory narratives. Processing information is never an objective exercise, and the three screens make this tension explicit. Built of concepts rather than chronological facts, the narrative doesn’t claim false objectivity, but instead, as Hall did, considers individual identity.
Hall famously said that ‘identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history’. The Unfinished Conversation is formed at this point too. Akomfrah’s montage favours engagement over passivity, and the multiple screens, perspectives, and times, underscore his idea of process. Hall saw identity as a stream, a flood, shaped by time and history, and always unfixable: an unfinished conversation. I leave the screening moved not only by Hall’s insights on cultural identity, but by Akomfrah’s ability to render these ideas poetic and poignant through his manipulation of form.
One of the works of literature featured in The Unfinished Conversation, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, describes a seashore table at sunrise. ‘Everything became softly amorphous,’ Woolf writes, ‘as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid.’ When I walk out of the Tate’s grey gut into a pale autumn dusk, I feel like I too have become softly amorphous.
