''The Unfinished Conversation'' is a 2012 multi-layered three-screen installation directed by

John Akomfrah Sir John Akomfrah (born 4 May 1957) is a Ghanaian-born British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in ...

, co-founder of the

Black Audio Film Collective The Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), founded in 1982 and active until 1998, comprised seven Black British and diaspora multimedia artists and film makers: John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, Edward George ...

. Through his celebrated technique of juxtaposing and layering archive footage with text, music and photographs, Akomfrah crosses the memory landscape of Stuart Hall,

Jamaica Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. At , it is the third-largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, west of Hispaniola (the is ...

n-born founder of

British Cultural Studies The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, its first director. From 1964 to 2002, it played a critical role in dev ...

, to reflect on the nature and complexities of memory and identity. ''The Unfinished Conversation'' was commissioned by Autograph ABP. It opened at

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in En ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, on 26 October 2013, following its premiere at Bluecoat during the 2012

Liverpool Biennial Liverpool Biennial is the largest international contemporary art festival in the United Kingdom. Since its launch in 1998, Liverpool Biennial has commissioned over 380 new artworks and presented work by over 530 artists from around the world. ...

Summary

''The Unfinished Conversation'' is a journey through theorist Stuart Hall's work and output on radio and television as a post-war immigrant who arrived in England in the first quarter of the 1950s and pioneered in British cultural studies, as the co-founder of the movement together with

E. P. Thompson Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in partic ...

and

Raymond Williams Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contribu ...

of the journal ''

New Left Review The ''New Left Review'' is a British bimonthly journal, established in 1960, which analyses international politics, the global economy, social theory, and cultural topics from a leftist perspective. History Background As part of the emergin ...

''. Director John Akomfrah, alongside his fellow

members, was engaged with Hall's academic project since the 1970s due to his appearance in the BBC programme ''It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum''. Consequently, ''The Unfinished Conversation'' is a personal project for the director reflecting on his own passage and research on archive-based work related to the notion of black identity.

The commission

Akomfrah's project ''The Unfinished Conversation'' started as an application to the

Arts Council An arts council is a government or private non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts; mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing arts events. They often operate at arms-length from the government to prevent pol ...

initiated by

Mark Sealy Mark Sealy (born 1960) is a British curator and cultural historian with a special interest in the relationship of photography to social change, identity politics and human rights. In 1991 he became the director of Autograph ABP, the Associati ...

, Director of Autograph ABP and executive producer of the project, based on the premise of commissioning a collaboration between Akomfrah and academic Stuart Hall about the notion of visual and black identity. However, the extensive availability of archive material featuring Hall on radio, cinema and television suggested a parallel project, the making of Akomfrah's documentary '' The Stuart Hall Project''. In an interview with writer-curator Georgia Korossi, Akomfrah explains: "I started to play around with the idea of seeing The Unfinished Conversation as our take on Hall's legacy and implications, and The Stuart Hall Project being pretty much his take on us, and the outside world." The project was made possible by Autograph ABP's commission, with the aim to bring visibility to photographic histories and practices that have often been overlooked.

The project

The acclaimed three-screen installation, ''The Unfinished Conversation'', was developed through the study and selection from 800 hours of Stuart Hall's own archive material of audio interviews and television recordings. With reference to identity, race and memory, ''The Unfinished Conversation'' re-imagines the nature of memory itself through an individual's personal archive, marked with the music of

Miles Davis Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th century music, 20th-century music. Davis ado ...

, one of Hall's much loved musicians, as Hall's remarkable archive triggers the world events that were unfolding. Akomfrah's multi-layered installation celebrates Hall's groundbreaking work on culture and identity that is still relevant today. It also examines the questionable nature of the visual that reflects on Hall's work in media studies; with reference to Hall's own position in the world, growing up in Jamaica as part of the Caribbean diaspora, it tackles his central idea that identity, ethnic, cultural or sexual, is fluid and open to recreation.

References

External links

''BP Spotlight: John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation''
at the

Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...

website. {{DEFAULTSORT:Unfinished Conversation Films directed by John Akomfrah 2012 films 2010s English-language films