THE UNFINISHED CONVERSATION: ENCODING/DECODING at the Power Plant (231 Queens Quay West), to May 18. 416-973-4949. Rating: NNNNN
The Power Plant’s Gaëtane Verna and Autograph ABP’s Mark Sealy, who curated Ryerson Image Centre’s excellent Human Rights Human Wrongs in 2013, have put together this dense exhibit of videos exploring black and post-colonial history.
It’s inspired by the ideas of Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall. In Encoding And Decoding In The Television Discourse, Hall used semiotics to explain the process by which marginalized people can reject or negotiate with the messages encoded by producers of culture. However, The Unfinished Conversation remains engrossing even for those of us unfamiliar with semiotics.
Giving the show its title is John Akomfrah‘s three-channel work about Hall, tracing his life from his Jamaican youth through his education in 1950s UK and career as a leftist intellectual. Akomfrah conjures the passions of the man and his times through a poetic stream of images of class struggle in postwar Britain, the Suez Crisis, peace marches, the Korean and Vietnam Wars and jazz music.
End Credits by 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen takes more than five hours to scroll through the FBI’s voluminous files on Paul Robeson, the black communist actor whose career was effectively ended by the bureau and the Un-American Activities Committee. Sculptor/musician Terry Adkins sets a soundtrack of Martin Luther King’s speech opposing the Vietnam War and Jimi Hendrix’s music to visuals of vintage photographs of balloons and zeppelins that vibrate ominously. (Adkins and Hall both died last year.)
Sven Augustijnen‘s documentary follows a Belgian former bureaucrat who served in the Congo and is researching the murder of Patrice Lumumba, visiting scenes and participants in the 1960s drama. It’s a dispassionate look at a ruling-class man who may or may not be addressing his complicity. Zineb Sedira also takes an oblique approach to post-colonial history in her poignant interview with an Algerian photographer’s elderly widow, who speaks about her efforts to preserve his politically engaged images of the 60s struggle for independence.
All are illuminating works with substantial run times, so plan on repeat visits to take in everything. They leave us pondering how our own lives affect our experiences of these astute artworks.
art@nowtoronto.com
