Installation view: “John Akomfrah, The Hour of The Dog” at the Menil Collection. Commissioned by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Menil Collection, Houston. © John Akomfrah, Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Paul Hester

It’s foolish to try to explain anything anyone does on Instagram, but this year’s earlier trend of posting pictures of oneself from 2016 struck me as an impulse that originated from a yen for authenticity. The posting of these images seemed to imply that in today’s influencer-centric, A.I.-generated world, our images back then could be more readily believed, because nobody was trying to sell you as many products, and the algorithms were less good at knowing what images could hypnotize us. Also we were younger then, yes, and many of us much more attractive.

But that authenticity impulse informs “John Akomfrah: The Hour of the Dog,” now at the Menil Collection in Houston. The show is essentially one work—a six-channel video installation of 50 minutes and 37 seconds, made in 2025 and co-commissioned by the Menil and the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it entered the collection. Co-curated by Michelle White of the Menil and Cecilia Wichmann of the BMA, the video and show engage with youth-led Civil Rights activism in the American South between 1954 and 1963, the decade of marches, boycotts, sit-ins and voter registration drives that produced the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra) built his film from archives—documentary footage, newsreels, oral histories, photography—and from footage he shot himself on a soundstage. The work plays with authenticity to the point where one cannot tell what is old and new and stops caring.

The hour of the dog, we are told in the beginning of the film, is the “liminal space between day and night” in the Chinese zodiac. Picture, if you will, an image where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives a speech on an old television while a modern-day actor in a mid-20th-century costume lies on a flat surface surrounded by real artifacts from the Freedom Riders. The camera pans over their clothes and their picket signs as the actor stares ahead with wide eyes. Real archival footage plays on other channels on the surrounding screens. “This is time, familiar and intimate,” a voice intones at regular intervals. “We are taken by it.”

The gallery guide tells us that the quote comes from Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and cites James Van Der Zee’s photographs of Black funerals in Harlem and West African funerary practice as the sources for these flat scenes, which constitute the majority of the film. The images do have the composed, well-dressed stillness of a body laid out properly, but something about the actors insists on the fact that they’re alive. They’re just immobile, like other aspects of our culture. Akomfrah isn’t trying to make the archival portion of this fresh. You’ve seen it all before: the mug shots of the Freedom Riders arrested for testing integration on interstate routes, Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture, and John Lewis. Of course, there are dogs. At times, the new footage becomes a three-dimensional living photograph depicting people from this era in ruined homes.

An anteroom holds four objects from the Menil’s own holdings, chosen by the artist. There is an African fetish object from the mid-19th to early 20th Century, a dog with a head at each end, but my favorite is a painting that I’ve always loved anyway. René Magritte’s The Dominion of Light (L’empire des lumières) (1954) represents a suburban home in oil, a daylit sky sitting on top of a black street. It is the spiritual twin to the film, in its liminality and painful stasis.

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