Frieze London

# Sir John Akomfrah at LG

LG the choice of Sir John, who like Mdm Sonia Bryce represented the UK while simultaneously representing all black people and the diaspora of black people from her and his ethnic heritage, including their British heritage, the very people who historically displaced them now honour them as producers of their culture, a culture only possible because of the oppression of people's and the enslavement of human beings. Does this make them defectors, traitors or does it in fact make them heroic, relevant, critical? If commerce was brought to the dark continent in search of a work force, humanity itself replicated that potential and displaced people, we are told or more succinctly indoctrinated into viewing or to perceive as a people believed to be technologically inferior and not civilised therefore useless. Was this oppressive domination a civilising, cultural or exploitative function, and exercise to enrich or perhaps done out of fear and our inability to recognize difference and celebrate it? Do we see black people thru Euro-Centric eyes alone? Or is this view of the African diaspora and our prejudicial mainly racist perception constructed by dominant ideological apparatuses? And our tainted gaze and complicit criminality a product of the dehumanising methodology and the grammar of geology (Kathryn Yusoff; A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None) it's extractive economies an initiative of colonialism and slavery undermining subjective life and prescribing our treatment of and relationship to the earth with the arrogance and conceit of naming geological time an anthropocene. It is a view of our prolonged and prejudicial construction of black people thru the lens of hypocrisy. The Hippocratic lens on the other hand, without direct relationship to its twin sounding other hypocrite, a word altogether distinct and otherwise without any intersubject, likeness or otherwise, refers to Hippocrates (Father of medicine), a title passed down from ancients despite only 8 sources mentioning Hippocrates as father of medicine in antiquity, one of those sources being Plato.

And so the play on words; Hippocrates and hypocrite, would be seen as a dissimulation, the exchange of meaning thru the phonetic, or the wind that sums up the becoming in Sir John's 'becoming wind' exhibited at Frieze London under the umbrella of a manufacturer of flatscreen monitors LG, selling out or not, the power of this idea entangles the intricacies inherent in art and something all art should convey, the multiplicities of meanings' ideas ideate.

Wind was the father of the Monkey God Hanuman. What does the Ramayana say of Wind and Monkeys? Hanuman was a myth derived from the Ramayana, and written by Hanumanji who is the monkey God, this idea of a creation and it's telling having not only authorship, the subject is the author Hanuman himself, Hanuman who subsequently bequeathed it to its current attribution and the first published Ramayana; Valmiki Ramayana, written after the Rig Veda; one of its hymns speaks of Vayu, the god of the Winds, father of Hanuman. In Sanskrit vāyu means air and Vāyu blower, the blower of air being semiotically identical, both are prescribed with the animate origins to life or deity of life, Mukhya-Vāyu.

Becoming Wind is then both a metaphoric representational tale of western centrism and it's Marxian referentialist dominance, subscribing both decolonialist inclusion to the marketing and advertising dictum of late capitalist society, prescribing the necessity of colonialist exploitation onto the colonial body rendering the decolonial narrative. Without the first, the second is moot. The LG motto is Inspiring Art. Sir John's work without question enjoys this platitude and without question the necessary critical dimension available to the medium simulating what it advocates as media and the availability of this medium while relishing within the irreproducibility of a man made sign, the hand of the artist despite its availability (digital video) and reproducibility to all, remains out of reach to most, the distinguishing apriori of which is the need for and without which nothing follows, the prerequisite of its origin, the LG flatscreen monitor inspiring art.