John Akomfrah: Mnemosyne

About

Mnemosyne by celebrated British filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah (b.1957) is a powerful new film installation which focuses on the experience of migrant labour in the UK - a poetic essay on the themes of memory and migration. To make it Akomfrah combined newly shot footage with archive material from the various television and film archive libraries. Mnemosyne refers to the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory in Greek mythology. Akomfrah's work questions memory and suggest the possibility for endless re-interpretation of historical events by interweaving archival footage from 1952 to 1981 with contemporary ‘portraits' of Britain and extracts of new work filmed in a remote snowy landscape. ‘a mind blowing film that merges documentary and artistic essay in a way that astonishes, confounds and moves' — Ken Russell, in The Times ‘hauntingly mournful, crisply original and utterly seductive' - The New Statesman