Review: Ghosts of Songs by Kodwo Eshun
Adrian Searle recently reviewed the exhibition behind Kodwo Eshun's upcoming book Ghosts of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective in the Guardian. The exhibition is presently showing at Liverpool's FACT center.
Searle reviews the history of the Black Audio Film Collective and its penchant for political discussion and debate:
The collective was heavily informed by film and psychoanalytic theory, by political discussion and debate. It is salutory to note how unfashionable these are, however much intense theorising there is in the exhibition catalogue. Sadly, much of it is likely to remain unread. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the group was the formulation of a poetic, a tone of voice, a particular kind of filmic space that resisted categorisation.
He also notes Eshun's commentary :
Kodwo Eshun, the group's most compelling commentator, writes that they "projected a stance of high seriousness with seductive stylishness." Stylishness could be serious too, and they always carried their seriousness with something much more than style.