Akomfrah's new series of photo-texts explore colour, race and the legacy of The Great Chain of Being. Both series build on the artist's work around monuments since the 1980s – including Handsworth Songs (1986) and Signs of Empire, (1983) – and reference poet Caroline Randall Williams’ astonishing essay, My Body is a Confederate Monument – published in The New York Times last year in response to demonstrations against imperialist monuments. ‘If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy,’ she writes, ‘if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.’

 The second series expands on Akomfrah’s recent edition, Our Skin Is a Monument I (2020), published on the cover of frieze magazine, which incorporates a still from the American film ‘Carmen Jones’ (1954), starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. In the new series, film stills of Dandridge are set alongside enigmatic and powerful statements on race (as in – ‘The Whiteness Was Not Consensual’), framed by solid blocks of colour. The colour blocks are a reference to the Shirley card, a device used in colour-film technology since the 1940s to calibrate skin-colour balance, that for decades only used white models to set their parameters, dramatically affecting how Black skin was rendered on film. 

Akomfrah's new series of photo-texts explore colour, race and the legacy of The Great Chain of Being. Both series build on the artist's work around monuments since the 1980s – including Handsworth Songs (1986) and Signs of Empire, (1983) – and reference poet Caroline Randall Williams’ astonishing essay, My Body is a Confederate Monument – published in The New York Times last year in response to demonstrations against imperialist monuments. ‘If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy,’ she writes, ‘if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.’

 The second series expands on Akomfrah’s recent edition, Our Skin Is a Monument I (2020), published on the cover of frieze magazine, which incorporates a still from the American film ‘Carmen Jones’ (1954), starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. In the new series, film stills of Dandridge are set alongside enigmatic and powerful statements on race (as in – ‘The Whiteness Was Not Consensual’), framed by solid blocks of colour. The colour blocks are a reference to the Shirley card, a device used in colour-film technology since the 1940s to calibrate skin-colour balance, that for decades only used white models to set their parameters, dramatically affecting how Black skin was rendered on film. 

Akomfrah's new series of photo-texts explore colour, race and the legacy of The Great Chain of Being. Both series build on the artist's work around monuments since the 1980s – including Handsworth Songs (1986) and Signs of Empire, (1983) – and reference poet Caroline Randall Williams’ astonishing essay, My Body is a Confederate Monument – published in The New York Times last year in response to demonstrations against imperialist monuments. ‘If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy,’ she writes, ‘if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.’

 The second series expands on Akomfrah’s recent edition, Our Skin Is a Monument I (2020), published on the cover of frieze magazine, which incorporates a still from the American film ‘Carmen Jones’ (1954), starring Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. In the new series, film stills of Dandridge are set alongside enigmatic and powerful statements on race (as in – ‘The Whiteness Was Not Consensual’), framed by solid blocks of colour. The colour blocks are a reference to the Shirley card, a device used in colour-film technology since the 1940s to calibrate skin-colour balance, that for decades only used white models to set their parameters, dramatically affecting how Black skin was rendered on film.