Black Audio Film Collective at PAMM presents a selection of films characterized by an interest in the diasporic African experience, memory, and new modes of representation. This evening, PAMM will screen The Last Angel of History (1995) and Memory Room 451 (1997), both by John Akomfrah, and the film will be introduced by Erin Christovale, assistant curator at Hammer Museum.
John Akomfrah
The Last Angel of History, 1995
Digital color video, with sound, 45 min., 7 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery
The Last Angel of History is one of BAFC’s most influential video-essays of the 1990s. This film explores the chromatic possibilities of digital video and takes place in a mythological future, creating connections among black subculture, outer space, and the limits of the human condition. This experimental blend of sci-fi parable and video-essay serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of Afrofuturism and the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.
John Akomfrah
Memory Room 451, 1997
Digital color video, with sound, 22 min.
Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery
Memory Room 451 is the most extreme vision of the Neo-Expressionist aesthetic that the group pursued throughout the 1990s. Set in a dystopian world, the film functions as a documentary from the future. A time traveler interviews “old earth people” on hair, desire, and memory as dreams become the new media platform of the 23rd century and time travel is depicted as no more than poorly paid shiftwork.
Erin Christovale is the assistant curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is the curator of Black Radical Imagination with Amir George, which has screened both nationally and internationally in spaces such as MoMA PS1, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco. Exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts; Memoirs of A Watermelon Woman (2016) and A Subtle Likeness (2016) at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives; and S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. She is currently organizing the 28th anniversary of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS with Vivian Crockett as part of Visual AIDS’ longstanding project, A Day With(Out) Art and Made in L.A. 2018 with Anne Ellegood at the Hammer Museum.
