Imagine the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’, where the astronaut confronts his future/past selves (only stretched out to 52 minutes) and you’ll get some idea of the dreamlike feel of John Akomfrah’s film installation, ‘The Airport’. Projected across three screens, it depicts a spaceman wandering about an abandoned airport in Greece, encountering strange, numinous characters – a solemn, black-tied bartender; various figures in Edwardian dress. There’s no dialogue, everything’s in slow motion and it’s all beautifully shot. The three screens create a feeling of ghostly disjointedness, allowing different timeframes and storylines to continually intrude and mingle.
Not that it’s ever clear what the story is, exactly – though somehow that only adds to the work’s mysterious charm. Sure, there are themes to do with race – Akomfrah co-founded the influential Black Audio Film Collective – but the scope is grander than that, like a sort of purgatorial vision, a Dante-esque tour of civilisation’s ruins.
Race is a more overt motif in the two other installations: ‘Tropikos’, a single-channel film set in Tudor England and Africa, exploring ideas of colonisation and alienation; and the diptych ‘Auto Da Fe’ (meaning ‘Act of Faith’), about the migrations of religious communities. Yet the switch to more concrete subject matter also has the unfortunate effect of making Akomfrah’s languorous directorial style seem mannered and indulgent.