Vertigo Sea Event

Description

Vertigo Sea is an exhibition featuring two remarkable installations by acclaimed artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah. Recognised internationally for work that engages with the human condition, winning the 2017 Artes Mundi Award, his films are powerful visions of global diaspora, expansive historical narratives and lamentations on individual mortality.

At Talbot Rice Gallery ‘Vertigo Sea’ (2015), which lends its title to the exhibition, is shown alongside ‘At the Graveside of Tarkovsky’ (2012), a monumental video and sound installation that exemplifies Akomfrah’s move from film and television to embrace the possibilities of the gallery environment. Part-filmed in Scotland, both films elegise the sea and use it as a metaphor for those lost to both recent and historic memory. Evolving from his work with the Black Audio Film Collective (beginning in 1982) they embody a political desire to allow those forgotten, displaced or repressed by history to haunt the present in order to inform alternative futures.

This exhibition is held by the Talbot Rice Gallery. Talbot Rice Gallery is part of The University of Edinburgh and is one of Scotland’s leading public galleries of contemporary visual art.