''Purple'' is a 62-minute immersive six-channel video installation created by the British artist and filmmaker

John Akomfrah John Akomfrah (born 4 May 1957) is a 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 all his films". A ...

in 2017. It draws from hundreds of hours of archival footage and combines with newly shot film, spoken word, and original music to explore climate change and its effects on human communities, biodiversity and the wilderness. It is divided into five movements and includes locations such as Alaska, Greenland, New York, Mumbai, rural Scotland, Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. It was commissioned by the

Barbican, London The Barbican Estate, or Barbican, is a residential complex of around 2,000 flats, maisonettes, and houses in central London, England, within the City of London. It is in an area once devastated by World War II bombings and densely populated b ...

and co-commissioned by Bildmuseet, Sweden; TBA21-Academy;

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple na ...

; Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon; and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. It premiered at the Curve, Barbican in October 2017 where it exhibited for nine weeks. ''Purple'' was jointly acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and the

, in 2021.

Exhibition history

* Curve, Barbican, London, October 2017 - January 2018 * Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, February 2018 - March 2018 * Bildmuseet, Umeå,

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

, April 2019 - September 2018 * Berardo Collection Museum,

Lisbon Lisbon (; pt, Lisboa ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 544,851 within its administrative limits in an area of 100.05 km2. Grande Lisboa, Lisbon's urban area extends beyond the city's administr ...

, November 2018 to March 2019 *

, May 2019 - September 2019 * Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, June 2019 - November 2019 * Palais de Tokyo, Paris February 2020 - May 2020 * Museum Kurhaus, Kleve, Germany, March 2020 - July 2020 *

Bass Museum The Bass Museum of Art is a contemporary art museum located in Miami Beach, Florida. The Bass Museum of Art was founded in 1963 and opened in 1964. History Early years John Bass (1891-1978) and Johanna Redlich (m. Feb. 21, 1921) were Jewish-imm ...

, Miami, May 2020 - August 2020 * Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., November 2022 - January 2024

Soundtrack

The installation's original score was composed by

Tandis Jenhudson Tandis Jenhudson (born 1979) is a British musician, composer and medical doctor, best known for his work on film and television soundtracks. He has received two Royal Television Society award nominations and is the first composer to have been hon ...

and

David Julyan David Julyan is an English musician and score composer. He is best known for composing the scores for director Christopher Nolan's early films. Early life David Julyan was born in 1967 in Cheltenham, England. Other projects In 2006, he score ...

Reception

The Telegraph gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, stating that "Akomfrah drives home his concerns with compelling clarity, sparking off chains of association that are grimly disturbing while offering a reminder of all the beauty that we stand to lose". The Guardian commented that "Akomfrah's overwhelming film evokes that very dilemma: our apparent helplessness as individuals in the face of rising sea levels and temperatures, droughts, and melting icecaps. Against a stirring contemporary classical soundtrack, his film begins by summoning up the momentum of industrial England, a world of mass production that signals - but is utterly unlike - the hyper-reality of contemporary globalism and digital interconnectivity".

Time Out Time-out, Time Out, or timeout may refer to: Time * Time-out (sport), in various sports, a break in play, called by a team * Television timeout, a break in sporting action so that a commercial break may be taken * Timeout (computing), an enginee ...

gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, stating "it can be frustrating being preached to when you’re in the choir, especially when Akomfrah isn’t offering any solutions or new comments. He’s just presenting all these horrifying visions of humanity’s impact on the planet. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Akomfrah is just overwhelmed, helpless and shocked in the face of our idiocy, standing slack-jawed under the Anthropocene’s wave of effluent. Maybe this is the only way he can start to make sense of it all."

City A.M. ''City A.M.'' is a freesheet, free business-focused newspaper distributed in and around London, England, with an accompanying website. Its certified distribution was 85,738 copies a day in February 2020, according to statistics compiled by the A ...

described it as a "wildly ambitious project is undertaken by documentary-maker and artist John Akomfrah, whose resulting video montage is at once mesmerizing, meditative and melancholy, a wild and sometimes overwhelming voyage through our lives on both a micro and macro scale." It went on to state that "It’s a wonderful piece of work, both uplifting and haunting, and a reminder that we all need to be better."

References

{{Reflist

External links

Purple
at IMDb Audiovisual art 2017 in art Climate change in art Multi-screen film Special-venue films