is a widely respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics, and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside artist Lina Gopaul, later joined by David Lawson who he still collaborates with today alongside Ashitey Akomfrah as Smoking Dogs Films. Their debut film, Handsworth Songs (1986), examined the 1985 Birmingham and London riots through a layered mix of archive, stills and new footage, earning international acclaim and defining Akomfrah’s distinctive visual style. Other works include the three-screen installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a moving portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s life and work; Peripeteia (2012), an imagined drama visualising the lives of individuals included in two 16th century portraits by Albrecht Dürer and Mnemosyne (2010) which exposes experiences of migrants in the UK, questioning the notion of Britain as a promised land by revealing the realities of economic hardship and casual racism.
In 2015, Akomfrah premiered his three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea (2015), which explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls ‘the sublime seas’. Fusing archival material, readings from classical sources and newly shot footage, Vertigo Sea highlights the cruelty of the whaling industry and juxtaposes it with scenes of many generations of migrants making epic crossings of the ocean for a better life. In 2017, Akomfrah presented Purple (2017), which addresses climate change, human communities and wilderness; and Precarity (2017), following the life of forgotten New Orleans jazz trumpeter Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden. In 2018, Akomfrah participated in the UK wide World War One arts programme 14-18 Now, with his multiscreen installation Mimesis: African Soldier (2018), which commemorated African and colonial participants who fought, served and perished during The Great War. In 2019 Akomfrah presented Four Nocturnes (2019) in the Ghana Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, a three-channel piece reflecting on the intertwined relationship between humanity’s destruction of the natural world and our of ourselves. In 2023, he premiered two major five channel films at the 15th Sharjah Biennial: Arcadia (2023), reflecting on ‘The Columbian Exchange’ between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe from the 1400s onwards; and Becoming Wind (2023), an allegorical representation of the Garden of Eden and its disappearance. In 2024 Akomfrah presented a new body of work entitled Listening All Night to the Rain in the British Pavilion in Venice, commissioned by the British Council for the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
