The final video work in the show, Synapse (2004), from Black Beethoven, carries the potential for a moment of surprise similar to the experience of “playing” Rowland’s piano roll for the first time. An image of the composer changes from an older white man to a younger black man (figs. 28 and 29). The timing is slow, almost imperceptible, so one might notice one image on the wall, and then turn back a few minutes later to see it completely transformed. In this work Adkins raises the question of the composer’s possible Moorish ancestry. Beethoven’s blackness was something Adkins heard about frequently as a child, growing up in Washington, DC, in the fifties and sixties, as a kind of “alternate history.”15 Synapse is accompanied by a low sound that plays in the background. The video gives space for visitors to question their own responses to the work and, by extension, their assumptions about race and classical music, and changing cultural canons.

Adkins’s work seduces through the varied textures and patinas of its surfaces, whether physical or digital, the flickering of film or the layers of lace. It intrigues with its suggestion of narrative, of biography, of the potential to reveal some essence of historical ghosts. And yet often the work questions more than it answers. It introduces the viewer to someone new, or newly reimagined, and then leaves it up to us to get acquainted. It works on a variety of senses—hearing, sight, touch (at least imagined)—and though I don’t believe the work had a distinctive smell, it feels as if it ought to. Visitors to Resonant Spaces responded to this, listening, looking, and discussing the work. The gallery space made this a familiar exercise for many. Simply by entering in they were prepared to engage with Adkins work.