My Body Is The Monument

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

This is one of a series of photo-texts that John Akomfrah made in 2021, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, US. At that time the reverberations of the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and related demonstrations against imperialist monuments were being felt throughout the world. In this work a woman in a cocktail dress wearing high heels poses for the camera at the summit of a rocky peak. The colour reproduction in each image looks slightly different. The photographs are placed into a Shirley card – a reference device in analogue colour-film technology to calibrate skin-colour balance in photographic images. Till the 1990s, Shirley cards only used white models to set their ‘normal’ reproduction parameters, which affected how Black skin was reproduced in images. The artist John Akomfrah is known for his art films and multi-screen video installations, which often explore issues of racial injustice, colonial legacies and diasporic identities. The title for these works comes from the 2020 essay by Caroline Randall Williams writing about the need to take down public memorials to the confederate states of America. These states in the 1860s, seceded from the US, intent on maintaining a society served by slave labour. ‘What is a monument but a standing memory?’ she writes, stating that she is descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help. ‘If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.’

John Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana and moved to England at the age of eight. He graduated in sociology from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1982 and was one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective (BACF) established to examine issues of Black British identity through film, and media. BAFC went on to produce the award-winning ‘Handsworth Songs’, which focused on racial tensions in Britain in the 1980s. Akomfrah’s work has been shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions in key institutions around the world and has featured in many international film festivals, including Sundance Film Festival, Utah, USA (2013 and 2011) and Toronto International Film Festival, Canada (2012). He was awarded the Artes Mundi Prize in 2017 and a Knighthood for services to the Arts in 2023. He has been commissioned to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2024.

Places

Subjects

woman, dress

Materials & Techniques

digital print, giclée, inkjet print

Artist

John Akomfrah (1957 - )

Title

My Body Is The Monument

Edition

One of an edition of 3, plus 2 artist's proofs

Date

2021

Medium

inkjet print

Dimensions

height: 102.8 cm; width: 152.8 cm; depth: 4.8 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Lisson Gallery, October 2021

Provenance

Lisson Gallery, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 14 October 2021

GAC number

19019