Menil Collection Debuts John Akomfrah's“The Hour Of The Dog”

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Menil Collection in Houston is currently presenting“ John Akomfrah: The Hour of the Dog,” an exhibition centered on a single, monumental six-channel video installation. Co-commissioned by the Menil and the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), the 50-minute and 37-second film, created in 2025, has also entered the BMA's collection.

Co-curated by Michelle White of the Menil and Cecilia Wichmann of the BMA, the exhibition delves into youth-led Civil Rights activism in the American South between 1954 and 1963. This period saw a decade of pivotal events, including marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and voter registration drives, which ultimately led to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Akomfrah, born in Accra in 1957, constructed his film using a blend of archival materials. These include documentary footage, newsreels, oral histories, and photography, alongside new footage he shot on a soundstage. The work deliberately blurs the lines of authenticity, making it challenging, and ultimately irrelevant, for viewers to distinguish between old and new imagery. The exhibition, located at 1533 Sul Ross St, Houston, TX, is on view through October 11, 2026.

The film opens by defining“the hour of the dog” in the Chinese zodiac as the“liminal space between day and night.” Viewers encounter scenes such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering a speech on an old television, while a contemporary actor in mid-20th-century costume lies amidst actual artifacts from the Freedom Riders. The camera captures their clothes and picket signs as the actor gazes forward. Concurrently, real archival footage unfolds on surrounding screens. A voice periodically intones,“This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it.”

According to the gallery guide, this quote is from Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time. The flat scenes that dominate the film are inspired by James Van Der Zee's photographs of Black funerals in Harlem and West African funerary practices. While these images possess the composed stillness of a properly laid-out body, the actors' presence underscores their aliveness, suggesting a static aspect of contemporary culture. Akomfrah's approach to the archival material isn't to make it appear novel. The film incorporates familiar images, such as mug shots of Freedom Riders arrested for testing interstate integration, and figures like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and John Lewis. Dogs also appear throughout the work. New footage occasionally presents people from that era within ruined homes, creating a three-dimensional living photograph.

An anteroom features four objects selected by the artist from the Menil's permanent collection. Among these is a mid-19th to early 20th Century African fetish object, depicting a dog with a head at each end. Also included is René Magritte's The Dominion of Light (L'empire des lumières) from 1954, an oil painting of a suburban home under a daylit sky contrasted with a dark street. This painting is considered a spiritual counterpart to the film due to its themes of liminality and painful stasis.

Source: Observer Arts

MENAFN04092026005694012507ID1111622726