There is a moment where the young black girl wandering through England in Larry Achiampong’s latest film, Wayfinder, fetches up in a fairground at dusk. Gaudy lights reflect in her eyes. An empty carousel turns before her. All of a sudden the last carriage of a ghost train hurtles noisily through the exit doors to bang into the first, which is waiting to start. The viewer is reminded of the film’s opening words: “The beginning of every story starts at the end of another.”
Circularity is the means, the message and the ruminative shape of Achiampong’s films. The British-Ghanaian artist, born in London in 1984, is perpetually roving through time and place: the past and the present, land mass and ocean, colonial and social history. He once projected an animation on a giant screen at Piccadilly Circus that could stand as his personal avatar: a figure in a helmet and suit who might come from outer space, the boy who fell to unjust Earth.
