John Akomfrah participates in Apollo Magazine's online discussion ‘Cinema and the Museum’
1 March 2021
On Thursday 4 March at 6pm GMT, Apollo Magazine and the Warburg Institute present ‘Cinema and the Museum’ as part of the ‘Museums of the Mind’ discussion series. Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah, the critic and screenwriter Emilie Bickerton and Deborah N. Landis, director of the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design at UCLA, will be in conversation with Fatema Ahmed, deputy editor of Apollo.
This particular discussion asks – given the existence of cinemas and dedicated film museums – what it means to make exhibitions about cinema in art museums. Would auteurs like Eisenstein and Tarkovsky be horrified by exhibitions that present fragments of their works – or would they be flattered? Is video art in black box galleries a type of cinema? And how have films of all kinds, from nouvelle vague classics to Hollywood heist movies, shaped how we expect museums to present the past and how we react to those displays?
