Flight Patterns: John Akomfrah at Lisson Gallery

No need to beat around the bush: Five Murmurations is the most haunting, wrenching new work of art I’ve seen so far this decade—appropriately so, since its subject is the haunting, wrenching state of the decade so far. In the three-channel video installation, which was on view this month at Lisson Gallery, British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah studies the global shutdown and the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd with a cool, cerebral gloom. Without presuming to ex