Visitors to Tate Liverpool can now explore a brand new exhibition titled: JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: Dark Waters, which focuses on the power and politics of the sea.
Tate Liverpool’s location on Liverpool’s historic waterfront, combined with the city’s maritime history, provides the perfect context to consider Turner (1775–1851) afresh. Conveying the intensity and diversity of life on the ocean, Turner’s work is presented for the first time within an immersive sound environment created by artist Lamin Fofana (b.1982).
Almost a third of Turner’s work features the sea, from the paintings that first established his reputation to his late experimental canvases. The exhibition features paintings, sketchbooks, and works on paper by Turner that capture a time of great change in our island’s relationship with its surrounding coast.
For this exhibition, Lamin Fofana presents three audio installations, Life and Death by Water 2021, Resounding Water 2022, and Ode to Impurity 2022. Life and Death by Water 2021 is partly based on the writing of pioneering black writer, academic and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, specifically his radical literary work of 1920, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.
Although creating work centuries apart, both artists convey the power and politics of the ocean, and its relationship to capitalism and colonialism.
JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: Dark Waters is available from 27 September – 4 June