THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION

JOHN AKOMFRAH

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UK, 2012

EDITED ON FINAL CUT PRO

45mins THREE SCREEN FILM ESSAY / DOCUMENTARY

SMOKING DOGS FILMS, FILM LONDON, BFI

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EXHIBITED AT:

TATE BRITAIN, LIVERPOOL BIENNALE, TAIPEI BIENNALE, NEW YORK'S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 

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COMMISSIONED BY AUTOGRAPH (ABP)

The Unfinished Conversation examines academic Stuart Hall’s memories and personal archives extracted and relocated in an imagined and different time, reflecting the questionable nature of memory itself. Stuart Hall is a product of both Europe and the Caribbean. His interests and concerns include Marxism, nuclear disarmament, culture, race, television, cultural politics, and diasporic identities. Akomfrah describes the work as an exercise in “spectropoetics”: a re-visitation of the ghosts that haunt a life, and an interrogation of the fundamental transformations in the imaginary that those hauntings ultimately produce. Hence, the work moves between Hall’s voice, ideas, memories, inventions, and insights, and immerses his biography in historical events. For Hall, identity is never a finished product or a given reality. Rather, it is an ever-changing relation that emerges in-between subjects and history- as, in his words, an “unfinished conversation.”

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