Artist Intro by John Akomfrah & Exhibition Statement
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UP:RISE - an Augmented Reality exhibition marking 10 years since the UK “riots” announced the arrival of 21st century Britain. www.uprise-exhibition.com @uprise_exhibition @uprise_exhibit An introduction to artist Baff Akoto I first met Baff Akoto at the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival (UK) in 2010. I attended a Masterclass he gave about his documentary film, Football Fables, and I was immediately struck by his extraordinary film intelligence. As I listened, I was further struck by the remarkable confidence with which he articulated his ideas about the content as well as - crucially for me - the form of Football Fables. This is a very rare combination. Most moving image people can usually speak with confidence about one but very rarely both. I knew then that Baff Akoto was a very special talent. He needed guiding and support but his gifts were undeniable to me. Since then I’ve watched Baff’s progression as an image-maker from his poignant direction of network TV drama to his visually arresting ‘brand films’ in Central and West Africa. It was during this time that we first discussed the burgeoning ambitions for an artistic practice, taking in ideas ranging from moving-image to virtual reality, and extending to Conceptual art and Activist Cinema. The profound and myriad nature of his increasingly confident and growing artistic practice has only just begun to be evidenced with his most recent works: LEAVE THE EDGES is mesmeric and THE LOVE &...THE MAGIC is astounding in its poetry, precision and defiance. The promise is beginning to be fulfilled. JOHN AKOMFRAH OBE CBE RA 1 of 4 UP:RISE Exhibition Statement A decade on from the 2011 riots, Baff Akoto honours a conversation sparked by a police shooting in Tottenham. Looking beyond the unrest that ensued, Akoto acknowledges the synthesis of individuals and communities, and the profound impact that this had on contemporary culture and discourse. Mainstream discourse was conspicuous in its failure to acknowledge August 2011 as a breaking point, and as the accumulation of generations of anti-police sentiment, in some of the most historically marginalised parts of the country. Mainstream discourse was conspicuous in its failure to acknowledge August 2011 as a breaking point and as the accumulation of generations of anti-police sentiment in some of the most historically marginalised parts of the country. The decades long morphing of racially aggravating Sus laws into similarly deployed Stop and Search meant that historical grievances (which underpinned riots in previous decades) were primed in 2011 to bond disparate youth, up and down the country, in a shared anti-police and anti-establishment identity. With countless voices denouncing the riots as “criminality,” the divisive and polarising tone of tabloid hyperbole was quickly normalised, gaining traction across mainstream media and becoming a habitual lens through which to view race, poverty and inequality. Akoto’s interactive exhibition actively explores this shift, interrogating the ways in which socio-political issues became fertile grounds for cultural warfare. Building on his filmic background, Akoto moves to the handheld screen referencing the novel digital and mobile agency which had emerged in 2011. Encrypted mobile messaging, namely BBM (Blackberry Messenger), was identified as a key mode of communication during these riots. It enabled masses of the nation’s youth to organise and gather at an asymmetrical pace which exceeded the capability of the state and its police forces to keep up. In the years since these unprecedented days of civil unrest, we have seen the insurmountable emergence and popularisation of platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok, to name a few. Akoto’s application of Augmented Reality, then, feels somewhat reverential. It acknowledges the 2011 protests as a key turning point in the public’s engagement with mobile and digital technology to engender social networks with real world consequence. Using their mobile phones, UP:RISE’s audience are challenged to curate their own journey by engaging with the work critically and on their own terms. Akoto’s embrace of Augmented Reality latches on to this elusive digital scene, once society’s mysterious undercurrent, now formative to the world we know and experience today. Character count, voicenotes, emojis, statuses and acronyms are an entangled cyber web of information that has since enabled protest culture to thrive on a global level, evidenced in recent years by the mainstream participation in movements such as #Metoo, school strikes for climate change, Extinction Rebellion and BLM. In acknowledging and highlighting the relative infancy of the digital age, and its inordinate effect in 2011, UP:RISE centres people power - and most importantly community power - boldly at the heart of digitisation and modernity. 2 of 4 With the exhibition only accessible via mobile devices, the phone acts as a tool to democratise the viewing experience and rejects the exclusivity of the gallery space in the process. QR codes activating public sites across the country encourage the audience to seek out specific locations and use their phone cameras to reveal the exhibition’s eerily crafted Augmented Reality visuals and soundscape. Floating cuboid sculptures constructed from archive and CCTV footage, appear suddenly as sinister apparitions. Their ghost-like presence is an uncomfortable reminder of the increased presence of surveillance in the public domain and the damning weight this footage held in court for many of 2011’s participants. With audio testimonies from those who attended the riots and protests also integrated into the work, Akoto harnesses the immersive potential of Augmented Reality. He offers the audience tangible encounters with the people, emotions and political landscape which seized whole cities and communities during this time of tension and loss. Akoto denies his audience the sense of distance usually felt during the retelling of history and past traumas. Augmented Reality then becomes a striking portal into the riots, positing the audience disturbingly as a powerless voyeur. In situating these so-called portals in public spaces, the work also brings into question our access to privacy in the digital age, and critically, what this might mean for historically marginalised communities. Akoto is keen to respond to an inclusive understanding of protest, civil unrest, rioting and activism. Regardless of specific catalysts, they each stem from similar socio-political inequalities and frustrations. Pertinently these moments have always inspired artists and their works throughout art history. Protest and art have always been historical bedfellows and an anthropological fascination and source of intrigue for filmmakers, writers, poets, painters and sculptors. Responding to the historic tradition that sees these key moments inscribed in the modernist fabric of contemporary art, Akoto joins his mentor John Akomfrah with Handsworth Songs (1986), Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Accra Shepp’s Occupying Wall Street (2011), Kara Walker’s Gone (1994), Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007) and Steve McQueen’s Mangrove (2020). To this multidisciplinary oeuvre, Akoto’s contribution is one that also constructs a narrative of time and place emboldened by the context of the current moment. When viewed from this art historical viewpoint, Augmented Reality can be appreciated as a contemporary artistic medium from which new visual languages can be formed. Running parallel to the exhibition is an extensive public programme produced by Akoto and Anthea Lewis. Connecting thought leaders, artists, creatives, poets, academics, community groups and individuals across the country, it engages with the themes, subjects and questions inspired by the exhibition and the riots themselves. As with the artwork, the public programme lends itself to the same autonomous approach, allowing the context of each city, its residents, and hosting spaces to inform and shape meaningful and thorough dialogue and debate. Framing community work as a powerful agent of change and an extension of artistic practice, UP:RISE employs inter-generational mentoring, round table discussions, study days, radio shows, podcast takeovers and other interdisciplinary workshops to retrace the inter-city connections and networks realised over the course of the 2011 protests. 3 of 4 In anchoring these discussions across the UK, with venues including BOM in Birmingham, FACT and The Bluecoat in Liverpool, and the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in London, the programme reflects the overwhelming display of solidarity with the community in Tottenham that was foundational to the spread of 2011’s rioting. Through its rigorous public programming UP:RISE is also able to pay homage to specific cities and their own unique histories of civil unrest, such as Toxteth in Liverpool and Handsworth in Birmingham which have both seen periods of rioting since the early eighties. UP:RISE understands past, present and future iterations of protest culture as symptomatic of unresolved, overlooked and ignored issues. The exhibition and public programme aim to explore these topics, creating space for underrepresented communities to lead the conversation. Baff Akoto is an artist living in London whose work has been exhibited at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and at the British Film Institute (BFI) in their Experimenta strand for “works by artists that revolutionise and reshape our vision of the cinematic moving image”.