Spirits were high at the dinner to celebrate John Akomfrah’s debut show at Lisson Gallery, which the artist-filmmaker marked with three major new installations and a batch of beautiful C-type photographic stills. Lisson has paired the exhibition with an appropriately museum-quality group show devoted to drawing, guest-curated by the Drawing Room.
As is so often the case with such an ambitious undertaking, adjustments were being made to these complex multi-screened works right up to the very last minute. Lina Gopaul—Akomfrah’s partner and co-founder of Smoking Dogs film production company—wryly contrasted the luxurious Lisson spread, provided by Galvin Bistrot de Luxe, with the hastily-procured fish, chips and sausages that the production team had consumed in the wee small hours of that morning to sustain them through the final sound edit.
Consumption of a very different kind was also under discussion with fellow guest Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, bemoaning Wednesday’s defeat of Labour’s tabled amendment to exclude alkyl nitrates—AKA poppers—from the government’s Psychoactive Substances Bill, which aims to outlaw a range of so-called “legal highs”. All present agreed that, while many of these substances currently on widespread offer are as—if not more—dangerous as those banned by law, this was a complex issue that would only be exacerbated by the bill’s crude blanket criminalization. That discussion over, everyone—except for your dry-January correspondent—promptly returned to their brimming glasses of wine: alcohol being a notable psychoactive substance that has already been granted special exclusion from the forthcoming legislation. Cheers!