Four works, typically, does not an exhibition make. But when one of them is a cinematic epic spanning centuries, continents, and three enormous screens, maybe so. "Vertigo Sea," occupying 10 times the footprint of the other three combined (a rough guess), is the main event here; it could have been presented on its own. That it's not is significant. With its dizzying crosscurrents of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, contemporary capitalism, and ongoing migrant strife, Akomfrah's piece both connects and deepens meaning for emblematic works in the MFA's collection. With its striking disproportion, the exhibition does what any well-crafted show should do: It scrambles expectation, brings new light to old works, and allows them to be seen anew.
It's tempting to cast Copley, Turner, and Jackson's works as exposition, hung as they are in an anteroom with "Vertigo Sea" in a walled-up great beyond. But I don't think that's quite true. They're additive, in some cases foundational, to the epic scope of Akomfrah's magnum opus. "Watson and the Shark," with its enigmatic Black figure at the center of a scene of oceanic disaster, has over time become a symbol of the forced comingling of cultures in an evolving Atlantic world; Turner's piece, laden with his abolitionist sympathies, stands as an emblem of its deep cruelties. Jackson evokes Drexciya, the mythic underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard. All are themes folded into the great tidal storm contained in the closed gallery just beyond.
Inside, "Vertigo Sea" engulfs. A hundred or more feet of sumptuous video teems over three massive screens, interweaving the vast power of the oceans from pole to pole; it's a tableau across which human enterprise, from industry to cruelty -- and often both at the same time -- is stretched to shattering. A soundtrack of sparse atonal composition mingles with the whine and shriek of the whales, and the crack of gunfire and harpoon; vivid scenes of leviathans bobbing amid ice floes on one screen (some of it borrowed from the BBC nature series "Planet Earth") while grainy archival footage of men flaying blubber from their dead hides unspools on the next.
It's a simultaneous lament for what was and a caution for what may yet come. "Vertigo Sea," now nine years old, contains clear strains of climate catastrophe, but puts it in the company of other man-made calamities centuries older. The piece imagines the oceans as a gauge of human impact on the earth, which has accelerated since the dawn of the colonial era and grown more destructive. "Vertigo Sea" is about all of those things.
Akomfrah, based in London, was born in Ghana in 1957, the year it gained independence from Great Britain. Starting in the 1980s as a cofounder of London's Black Audio Film Collective, he's always centered his work on deep undercurrents of injustice from a compassionate, purposeful remove. With poetic cascades of image and sound, Akomfrah shows, never tells, his connections gossamer-like and intuitive.
His 2015 three-channel piece, "The Unfinished Conversation," one of the most moving works of art I've encountered, was a kaleidoscope of image and sound. In it, footage from 1960s civil rights protests and jazz performance orbited a lifetime of speeches and interviews by and with Stuart Hall, the British-Jamaican philosopher, a lifelong advocate for racial equality. Akomfrah's "Purple," which played at the ICA's Watershed in 2019, spread across six massive screens, unfurling elegant images of environmental destruction, links in a chain across generations.
"Vertigo Sea" strikes some of the same tones, but it's more powerful, implicative. It leaves no doubt that cruelty is exclusively human, and that the pursuit of wealth fuels all. But it doesn't scold; it simply invites you to see for yourself. From the hands clawing at the waves from below in Turner's painting, it's no great leap to footage from the 1970s of overloaded, half-sunken vessels of Vietnamese "boat people" in "Vertigo Sea." A more visceral echo of human cruelty comes with one of the film's most blunt dichotomies: Scenes of whales dying in a sea stained with their own blood juxtaposed with images of the bodies of Black migrants lapped by waves on an unidentified beach. The oceans are indifferent to have and have-not, though means, or lack of them, make all the difference to survival.
Akomfrah has an uncanny sense of the poetry of moving pictures, a sublime of terror; on one screen, a fog of starlings takes to the sky against a fiery sunset while, on another, a giant tuna is hauled wriggling from the depths; jellyfish swarm; a polar bear's carcass quivers as it's dragged across the snow; two humpbacks breach the surface in perfect synch. The camera navigates a kelp forest alongside footage of orca swamping an ice floe where a seal struggles to stay above water and safe from their jaws.
Loosely symphonic, Akomfrah's piece includes discordant notes: a close-up of a hand, damp, limp, and still, against a grainy beach; a worker perched atop a mountain of whale blubber, raking fatty tissue crimson-stained with blood. We see mugshot-like images, some of tribal peoples, some exhumed from enslavement archives, some, assumably, of migrants, tying together the shared experience of helplessness across place and time.
Akomfrah relies on his audience to craft their own meaning from his miasma of image and sound; but agency so absolute can be daunting, so he employs a helpful narrative thread. I always wonder why an artist so resistant to pedantic gesture surrenders to simple sense-making, and in "Vertigo Sea" it makes me a little uneasy. A Black man in a tricorner hat appears at intervals, variously surveying a fogged-in mountainscape, or a rocky shore strewn with wreckage from a downed ship.
Deeper reading will reveal that the man is Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved Nigerian who endured brutal displacement as a child and bought his own freedom in his 20s in the 18th century. He went on to become an abolitionist and adventurer, traveling to the Arctic and beyond (his remarkable autobiography, "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself," could be the subject of its own movie; I'm surprised it's not).
Equiano's view, as a free man surveying land and sea rapidly swallowed by enterprising greed, offers a narrative counterpoint to the themes implied by Akomfrah's visual rhythms. Is it necessary? Spectacularly shot scenes aside, I'm not sure.
The piece's final moments may offer a more powerful redemption chord -- a note, incongruously, of hope -- with footage of a boat opening its engines full throttle, to a majestic orchestral surge, as it tries to drag a beached whale to the safety of the deep sea. Can wrongs be righted in gestures small as well as grand? Little by little, we will see.