John Akomfrah

The Unfinished Conversation is Akomfrah’s first large-scale video installation, building on his work as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a group active in the United Kingdom from 1982 to 1998. Known for its essayistic films, the collective integrated archival footage to critically reevaluate what it described as the “figuration of identity” in cinema. This installation, comprising three synchronized video projections, traces the life and work of the Jamaican-born cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall. Hall enrolled at Oxford University in 1951. His alienation from the university’s sociopolitical elite and his long-standing interest in histories of political oppression propelled him to become an influential figure of the British New Left—a movement that grew out of Marxism but that featured an expanded focus on civil rights and labor organization—and a founder of the field of cultural studies.

Akomfrah’s film interweaves archival imagery documenting historical events—including the post–World War II migration of nearly half a million Caribbean people to Britain, a group known as the Windrush generation—together with images from personal moments in Hall’s life. In doing so, Akomfrah has created a form of storytelling that illustrates Hall’s description of identity as a “matter of becoming” or an “ever unfinished conversation.” The film’s narrative ends in the late 1960s but includes recent interviews with Hall before he died in 2014, echoing his reflection on identity as belonging “to the future as well as to the past.”