THE GHOSTS OF SONGS: A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE 1982 – 1998
2 February – 1 April 2007
www.fact.co.uk
It is rare that the actions of a trade
union are an incentive for an avant-garde visual practice. Set in motion by
the Association of Film and Television Technicians (ACTT), the 1984 Workshop
Declaration was one of a handful of reforms in the early 80s that were meant
to stem the growing class, racial and generational fractures in Britain. In
the wake of the miner’s strike, the rise of a violent right-wing faction,
local (Brixton) and international (Ireland and the Falkland Islands) unrest,
the Workshop Declaration tendered a financial and organisational
relationship between mainstream media and young artists, who were more tuned
into the social conflicts of their time, often exercised through the
aesthetics of punk and reggae music, and time-based media. If the Workshop
Declaration gave artistic collaboration a financial seed, then the newly
formed Channel 4 gave collectives Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo Film &
Video Workshop, Retake, and Sankofa Film and Video an outlet to distribute
their media interventions to the public.
The collectives’ overt charge to train young blacks and Asians for the film
and television sectors resulted in their functioning like a cross between a
Hollywood Studio and a commune, wherein divisions of labour, creativity,
authorship, and vision were blurred by the actuality of producing film and
video on shoestring budgets in a country that lacked a sustained film
industry. As a result, and, perhaps, because of the success of the
enterprise, most of the collectives dispersed after a few years and a few
films, with many former members moving into leading industry posts, like
Nadine Marsh-Edwards (Sankofa) or Menelik Shabazz (Ceddo), or, as is the
case of Isaac Julien, who co-founded Sankofa while still an art student at
St. Martins’, becoming art stars.
Unlike the rest of their cohort, Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) had a
slightly different trajectory. They remained a cohesive group from 1982
until 1998, during which time they produced some of the most challenging
examples of film and video made in Britain, while gaining a significant
amount of international attention. As the title suggests, ‘The Ghosts of
Songs’ traces their path from collective media artists to their
post-collective collaborations. In many ways, staging ‘The Ghosts of Songs’
as a comprehensive retrospective sheds light onto all of the collectives and
their contribution to British art, film and video, through the specific case
of BAFC.
Curated by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith group (a noted
media collective in their own right) and designed by the architect David
Adjaye, ‘Ghosts of Songs’ casts BAFC (AKA John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste,
Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, Trevor Mathison,
and Claire Johnson, an early departee) through a bifurcation, which could be
read as something as monumental as a geologic rift or as quaint as a
double-sided album. The first rift/Side A is ‘Excavations: 1982-1989’, which
is comprised of three discrete screening galleries. These galleries, called
chambers, are lined with felt on the inside and covered by felt on the
outside. Each one features a single film on a continuous loop. From left to
right, the films are in chronological order, beginning with their first
major production, Signs of Empire (1982-4), which was originally a
slide-tape projection – that funny in-between medium.
The second chamber features what is likely their most well-known and
circulated tutorial on the casual street violence and commonplace police
brutality visited upon blacks in Britain in the 1980s, Handsworth Songs
(1986). Though Handsworth specifically addressed the uprisings in black
communities in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1985, the film served as a counter
narrative to the media’s (print, radio, and televised) depiction of
Handsworth, Brixton, Notting Hill or Toxteth as riots instigated and
perpetuated by blacks against a calm, civil, England. Their mastery of this
turn occurs by using the same media skills of documentary, selective
framing, sympathetic versus unsympathetic figures, and neutral voice-overs
to tell a different story. The last film in this suite is Twilight City
(1989), a borderline fantasy feature which casts London as a dim Metropolis;
at turns sullen and sultry.
‘Excavations’’ twin rift/Side B is ‘Disenchantments: 1990-1998’, which
consists of a fourth screening chamber for Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993)
and, The Black Room, an installation of film, texts, music and ephemera that
have in some way inspired them. Compiled collaboratively, this multi-room
jumble was shown in another iteration in 1996 at the ICA in London. This
time, The Black Room points out that Black Audio Film Collective was a
misnomer for their production, which encompassed photography, slide tape,
video, installation and posters, not just film. The show is, I think, split
in two to denote a conceptual shift in their practice between the 80s and
the 90s. In the transition from one decade to the next, their films gained
technological surety, moving away from the gritty, post-punk pictorialism of
their earliest projects. Some members seemed to take on different roles,
which may have been what allowed them to last as a unit for so long. By the
conclusion of the exhibition, BAFC emerges as the 1980s equivalent to the
London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in the 1960s and 1970s: an outlet for an
uncharted filmic avant-garde.
From Liverpool, ‘The Ghosts of Songs’ will travel to the Arnolfini in
Bristol and then onto a joint exhibition in London at the Whitechapel
Gallery and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in 2008.
COURTNEY J. MARTIN