ARTICLES
Seeing Dialectically: Systemic Crisis and Prognostic Intelligence in John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea
Peter Lešnik
Pages 67-108| Published online: 12 June 2025
Lešnik, Peter. 2025. “Seeing Dialectically: Systemic Crisis and Prognostic Intelligence in John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea.” Marxism & Sciences 4(1): 67–108.
https://doi.org/10.56063/MS.2301.04106
ABSTRACT
This article explores the potential of multi-channel installations to tackle the aesthetic and epistemological challenges posed to contemporary visual cultures by the scope and complexity of the current systemic crisis. Focusing on John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), the author conceives of the three-channel instal-lation as an audiovisual dispositive geared towards the articulation of dialectical modes of perception and cognition. The first part of the article reconstructs Ver-tigo Sea’s counter-narrative of globalization, highlighting the installation’s inter-est for the mechanisms of social exclusion and erasure that sustain the planetary unification initiated by the advent of European colonialism in the early modern era. In the second part of the article, the author concentrates on the workings of Akomfrah’s dialectical montage and on the visualization of the present in the guise of an expansive field of non-simultaneity. Suggesting that Akomfrah’s dia-lectical approach to filmmaking and moving-image exhibition fosters a specta-torial engagement based on forms of prognostic intelligence, the article eluci-dates the political stakes of Vertigo Sea’s response to a crisis that is simultane-ously unfolding across social, environmental, and epistemological domains.
KEYWORDS: multi-channel installations; John Akomfrah; Anthropocene; dialectical montage; blackness; globalization; primitive accumulation.
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