The arrival of Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors in the Americas led to the destruction of empires and civilisations and the deaths of millions in the new world – not by war, but from the waves of diseases that travelled from the old world to the new. Human contact took smallpox, plague, typhus and measles to the new world and brought syphilis to the old. It also led to the traffic of plants and animals, precious metals, populations, commodities and ideas from one side of the world to the other. The effects of exploration and conquest, migration and colonisation, in what has come to be called The Columbian Exchange, are too many to catalogue. It changed everything and is certainly too much to unpack here, on a gallery wall-panel or even in a 50-minute film by John Akomfrah, whose hugely ambitious art always gives the effect of running away with itself. Arcadia, presented on five screens butted together in the form of a cross, glosses a history of these fateful transactions and consequences in a constantly unfolding series of vignettes, choreographed tableaux and montaged footage culled from many sources. Keeping up is hard to do.
