John Akomfrah, Glasgow review: 'an epic tribute to six million soldiers'

John Akomfrah’s visually impressive film Mimesis: African Soldier is a flawed but thoughtful tribute to immense sacrifice, writes Susan Mansfield

A still from Mimesis: African Soldier by John Akomfrah | John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah: Mimesis: African Soldier, GoMA, Glasgow ****

Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, Tramway, Glasgow ****

Leanne Ross: Dirty Dancing Flowers, Tramway, Glasgow ***

As impossible tasks go, the job of paying tribute to the six million soldiers from Britain’s colonies who fought in the First World War is a significant one. How to encompass the diverse experiences of troops from Africa, South East Asia, the Caribbean, men who, even more than most, were in a war not of their choosing? How to honour what happened at the time while acknowledging the significant shifts in attitudes since?

John Akomfrah’s film Mimesis: African Soldier, a 14-18 NOW commission recently presented to the collections of Glasgow Museums and Bristol Museum, is at least suitably epic. Now being shown in Scotland for the first time in the main ground floor gallery at GoMA, it’s big (73 minutes long, shown across three large screens), serious and visually impressive. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the task any less impossible.

Akomfrah mixes archive footage of soldiers boarding ships, loading supplies, eating from mess tins, digging trenches, burying the dead, with elegant contemporary tableaux using actors in the uniforms of colonial regiments. A soldier gazes out to sea, surrounded by suitcases. Another stands in a wood with billowing flags around him. One returns to a deserted village in a generic hot country where a woman waits.

No words are spoken, but some appear on the screen almost like scene titles: disenchantment, rude awakening, sophisticated, undeceived. Water, which was also a major feature of Akomfrah’s epic film work for the British Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, washes over old photographs and discarded weapons. The use of a human skeleton as a prop, however, sounds a discordant note: it feels both unnecessary and tokenistic. We know people died, but if one skeleton, why not one thousand?

The film’s pace is constantly changing, the sped-up archive footage, in which men seem to rush towards their doom, contrasting with the stillness of the contemporary shots which evoking the legacy, suggest subsequent changes, wars, displacement, ask what it means to return to a place which is no longer the same, and neither are you. Does it convey the extent of the impact? No, but it’s hard to imagine anything which could.

It is, as the title says, a representation, a mimesis, something in which a small number of images have to stand for something much bigger. Does it end up expressing a vague generality instead of specific experiences? Yes, but it’s hard to see how it could do anything else. It’s carrying more weight than any one film, however epic, can be expected to carry. The result is flawed, but it approaches its impossible task with thoughtfulness, dignity and grace.

Installation view of Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit | Keith Hunter

Meanwhile, Tramway 2 hosts a major exhibition by one of Scotland’s most important Black women artists, Maud Sulter. Sulter, who liked to describe herself as Glaswegian-Ghanaian, died in 2008, aged just 48. Had she lived, she would surely have shared the belated recognition awarded to her contemporaries Lubaina Himid, Ingrid Pollard, and 2024 Turner shortlistee Claudette Johnson. This show, curated by Pelumi Odubanjo, is a rare chance to see the scope and ambition of her work.

What is most striking is that, while the technology reflects the time at which the work was made – analogue video tape, cut-and-paste collages – the content of the work feels astonishingly contemporary. Sulter’s commitment to bringing to the fore the overlooked stories of Black women, the way she used her own story and her own body in her work, her interest in colonial histories and the language of art and museum artefacts, all chime with work being made today. It’s no surprise that many younger contemporary artists describe her as an influence.

Sulter was a writer and poet before she moved into visual art, and this show puts the focus on her spoken word and moving image work rather than the photography for which she is best known. A rarely seen film, No Oxbridge Spires (1998-9), follows a journey on foot around the South side of Glasgow with her mother, aunt and two daughters, telling stories of her upbringing. Another film, My Father’s House (1995), uses video footage from the three-day funeral rites for her father, Dr Claude Ennin, in Ghana. This is the closest she came to knowing him, an eye surgeon and diplomat, whom she never met.

She explores the stories of particular Black women overlooked by history. Les Bijoux is a series of photographic portraits of herself as Jeanne Duval, the companion and muse of Charles Baudelaire. Her Alba Sonnets explore the lives of two Black women at the court of James IV of Scotland. Her film Plantation (1994) uses film footage from her own abdominal surgery (there is a lot of this, and it’s a hard watch if you’re squeamish) to explore, ultimately, the story of Bertha Mason, the “mad woman in the attic” in Jane Eyre, who is implied to have been Jamaican Creole.

The largest works in the show are collages from the series Syrcas, which combine images from European art with African art objects and old postcards of Alpine landscapes to address the subject of the genocide of Black Europeans under the Nazis. They are paired with a poem, Blood Money, the story of a woman circus performer from Cameroon who died in the concentration camps. Like Mimesis, it’s one take on a big subject, but it’s also indicative of Sulter’s determination and ambition for her work. One wonders, not for the first time, what more she would have gone on to achieve had she lived.

Installation view of Dirty Dancing Flowers by Leanne Ross | Contributed

After the semi-darkened space of Tramway 2, the work of Leanne Ross in Tramway 5 is an explosion of joy. Ross, who has Down’s Syndrome, is represented by Glasgow gallery Kendall Koppe and has had her work shown in Frieze. She is primarily a painter, but this installation is made “immersive” with the addition of a karaoke stage in the shape of a flower, and a cheery soundtrack of disco music (including hits from the movie Dirty Dancing, which inspired the title).

One wall is covered by a burst of exuberant flower paintings. There are also a selection of “Shout Out” paintings, in which Ross captures words or short phrases in bright panels of colour: “Colour in”, “Eat out”, “Uh Oh”. Often suggesting more than one reading, they work like a kind of pop art concrete poetry. The work stands up perfectly well in a contemporary art context, offering a joyful, colourful, breath of fresh air which will be enjoyed by many.

John Akomfrah until 31 August; Maud Sulter until 30 March; Leanne Ross until 23 March