The Ghanaian British filmmaker and video artist John Akomfrah will represent Britain at the next Venice Biennial.
Skinder Hundal, the global director of arts at the British Council and commissioner of the British Pavilion, just said in a statement:
"The quality and contextual depth of his artistry never fails to inspire deep reflection and awe. For the British Council to have such a significant British-Ghanaian artist in Venice is an exhilarating moment."
Akomfrah himself replied in a statement:
"I’m grateful to be given a moment to explore the complex history and significance of this institution [the British Pavilion] and the nation it represents, as well as its architectural home in Venice, with all the stories it has told and will continue to."
Born in Accra, Ghana in 1957, John Akomfrah has been based in London since childhood.
He came to prominence in the early 1980s as part of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a group of seven artists founded in 1982.
From his early years with the BAFC to his recent works as a solo artist, he has explored charged social issues—including racial injustice, colonialist legacies, diasporic identities, migration and extreme weather events—through a distinctive approach to memory and history.
He was knighted in the King’s New Year UK Honours List for 2023.
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Well known for his "searing video installations" examining issues ranging from climate change to colonialism, I've been following his work closely since I met him in January 2016 at Arnolfini.
He became the main inspiration for my art book as I explain here.
'My favourite show at the Arnolfini was definitely ‘Vertigo Sea’ by Ghanaian British filmmaker John Akomfrah, in 2016! His work with the Black Audio Film Collective and lately Smoking Dogs Film has had a huge influence on my tastes in art and reflections on our post-modern world…'
Recently, his films were shown in many art venues:
The film was created for the Curve at the Barbican centre, just after the artist won the 2017 Artes Mundi prize,
An ambitious project, Purple is an immersive, six-channel video installation addressing climate change and its effects on human communities, biodiversity and the wilderness.
The Barbican wrote: "At a time, when according to the UN, greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are at their highest levels in history, with people experiencing the significant impacts of climate change, including shifting weather patterns, rising sea level, and more extreme weather events, Akomfrah’s Purple brings a multitude of ideas into conversation including animal extinctions, the memory of ice, the plastic ocean and global warming. Akomfrah has combined hundreds of hours of archival footage with newly shot film and a hypnotic sound score to produce the video installation."
- 'The Unfinished Conversation' was screened at Tate Britain, until the end of 2022.
- 'Mimesis: African Soldier' on the soldiers of the Commonwealth is at Bristol Museum now until Jan. 2023: https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/john-akomfrah-mimesis-african-soldier/
His work will also be exhibited at the next Sharjah Biennial (7 February-11 June 2023), and then at The Box, in Plymouth, from December 2023.
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I've been willing to write further about his work and journey for a long time!
As an artist, filmmaker, and thinker, John Akomfrah has helped reshaping the debate on "otherness" in the UK
He is one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, launched in 1982 by a group of Black British filmmakers, based in Portsmouth and in Dalston, East London, mostly in response to anti-racist protests in Brixton from 1981.
The filmmakers were John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison. Their work was first screened at Arnolfini in 1986.
They produced award-winning films, photographs, slide tapes, videos, installations, posters and interventions.
John Akomfrah explained in October 2020: “From the beginning, I wanted to be part of a collective, of a group of like-minded artists and especially people of colour. We were into doing our own things, not into trying to get in where we knew we were not expected.”
Among the films were ‘Expeditions: Signs of Empire’ (1989) and the 35mm colour 22-minute short film ‘Images of Nationality’, directed by John Akomfrah and produced by Lina Gopaul (1984), as well as Akomfrah’s ‘Handsworth Songs’ (1986), a reflection on anti-racist protests.
The film offers a deconstruction of the blaming of young anti-racist protestors, and the police’s violent response, together with a lyrical analysis of post-colonial migration history. The film won seven international awards in 1987. It revolves around techniques that made Black Audio Film Collective recognisable: a multi-layered and complex narrative, visual and sonic experimentation, a mix of archival material, newsreels and still photographs of Black people’s lives.
The collective operated until 1998.
A decade later, in 2007, Arnolfini would co-curate a major retrospective of their work with The Otolith Group entitled ‘The Ghosts of Songs’.
Since the dismantling of the collective in 1998, former members Lina Gopaul and David Lawson have created the production company Smoking Dogs Film with Akomfrah. They produced the multi-screened installations The Unfinished Conversation (2012) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013), which provided in depth insight into their major intellectual influence: Stuart Hall. Born in Jamaica, Hall arrived in Britain in 1951 to study at Oxford University. His incisive writing analysed Britain’s imperial and economic disempowerment of its former colonies, as well as the major changes induced in Britain by displacements of colonial subjects.
Akomfrah’s recent work has been more often featured in galleries than on television or in cinemas. He has evolved toward a radical artistic approach and started using cinematic archives to compose art films projected as multi-screened installations, or as he called it himself: “a post-cinematic world of moving images”.
His film Vertigo Sea, created for the Venice Biennale in 2015, premiered in the UK at Arnolfini in Bristol, as many of the images had been found in the BBC Natural History Unit's archives in the city.
In my book on Bristol, I wrote:
'Shattering reflexion on slavery, migration and conflict, the film was projected on three large screens, delivering a sensual, poetic meditation on our relationship with the sea, exploring its role, both mesmerising and tragic, in human history, using television archives and images from the BBC Natural History Unit, based in Bristol.'
“I haven’t destroyed this country,” wrote John Akomfrah in the Guardian at the time of the screening, “there’s no reason other immigrants would252,” offering a vibrant plea in favour of human rights and solidarity. A week later, he was in Bristol for a public conference in the gallery and reminded the audience that “it is not possible to immerse the past for good and expect it to disappear,” in front of dozens of people who opened a debate on Bristol’s past in slave trade and raised again the question of the naming of the Colston Hall.
Vertigo Sea offers a poetic, visual, sonic and deeply moving meditation on our relationship with the sea, exploring its role, both mesmerising and tragic, in recent human history, migration, conflict, slavery and environmental exploitation.
The Guardian’s Adrian Searle described how “the ecological and the political combine in a 43-minute visual assault.” For the creation of the piece, John Akomfrah worked with a huge range of archival footage of the sea from the BFI and the BBC. (Bristol itself came to be at the centre of this exploratory visual project, as the filmmaker did research and used archives from the BBC Natural History Unit, in Clifton). Hundreds of clips and images of the ocean, beaches, skies, icebergs, animals – most notably whales - are used to represent humanity’s violence against nature, and as metaphors for humanity’s violence against itself.
Since 2006, I had regularly been working with one of John Akomfrah's friends – the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. And had been introduced to his work, especially while doing research on Karl Marx, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon and Exterminate All The Brutes on the history of settler colonialism / white supremacy.
His work has been one of the most eye-opening for me and my research since I came back to Britain in 2015, and I'm really grateful for his contribution to British arts.
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