Title: Our Skin Is a Monument

Year: 2020

Media:  Giclée print on Mohawk Superfine White Eggshell paper

Size: 49.5 x 41.5 cm

About the work: This artwork, Our Skin Is a Monument I (2020), which first appeared on the cover of the October 2020 issue of frieze magazine, incorporates a promotional still from Carmen Jones (1954), starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. The still is placed into a Shirley card, a reference device used since the 1940s in colour-film technology to calibrate skin-colour balance. For decades, Shirley cards only used white models to set their parameters, dramatically affecting how Black skin would be rendered on film.  Our Skin builds on John Akomfrah’s work around monuments since the 1980s, drawing on the poet Caroline Randall Williams’ astonishing essay, ‘My Body is a Confederate Monument’ – first published in The New York Times before it was widely circulated on social media. ‘If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy,’ she writes, ‘if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.’

Bio: John Akomfrah’s works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, started in London in 1982 alongside artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today alongside Ashitey Akomfrah as Smoking Dogs Films. Using montage techniques and bricolage, the artist weaves new footage together with archival material, newsreel and still photography in multi-layered visual style that has become a signature motif of the practice. Overlaid with an immersive sound design, conversations are constructed between past, present and future, bringing forth a multiplicity of issues through non-linear narratives. In recent years, his films have evolved into ambitious, multi-screen installations shown in galleries and museums worldwide.