JOHN AKOMFRAH

Early Years

Born in Accra, Ghana in 1957, John Akomfrah moved to the United Kingdom as a child after his family fled political unrest. He studied sociology and film at Portsmouth Polytechnic, graduating in 1982. That same year, he co-founded the Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998), a groundbreaking group that combined experimental filmmaking with critical theory to challenge mainstream narratives of race, identity and British culture.

Akomfrah lives and works in London, where he continues to make moving-image artworks that have shaped the field of contemporary art and political cinema over four decades.

Artworks

John Akomfrah’s artworks are distinguished by their richly layered video installations that blend archival footage, scripted voiceover, original cinematography and immersive sound design. Exploring themes such as post-colonial identity, collective memory, migration and environmental collapse, his works defy linear narrative in favour of non-chronological, poetic structures. Akomfrah engages with contemporary art and political history through a cinematic lens, offering audiences a meditative and affective space for reflection.

Montage and Memory

Akomfrah is best known for his use of montage to excavate buried or fragmented histories. Drawing on found materials—including newsreels, film archives, still photographs and literary references—his works reassemble stories of diasporic experience and social rupture. Rather than offer answers, they pose open-ended questions, suggesting that memory is provisional and history incomplete. Through this process, his contemporary art practice makes visible the aftershocks of empire and migration in the modern world.

Sound and Image

The artist’s soundscapes are integral to the experience of his artworks. Collaborating frequently with composer Tandis Jenhudson and others, Akomfrah uses music and ambient audio to build atmosphere, emotion and rhythm. The sonic and visual elements in his artworks are never merely illustrative but entwined, creating environments that draw viewers into what he calls ‘temporal palimpsests’—spaces where past and present coexist. His installations often span several screens, enveloping the viewer and challenging the static conventions of gallery display.

Listening All Night to the Rain (2024)

Representing the United Kingdom at the 60th Venice Biennale, Akomfrah presented Listening All Night to the Rain—a powerful meditation on environmental precarity and historical violence. The multi-screen installation incorporated imagery of rising seas, archival protest footage, and poetic narration to explore the interconnectedness of ecological collapse and human displacement. Balancing urgency with lyricism, the work expanded Akomfrah’s longstanding concerns with justice and remembrance into new, planetary dimensions, underscoring his position as one of contemporary art’s most vital and visionary voices.

Awards and Accolades

• Representation at the British Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale (2024)
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), for services to art and film (2018)
• Artes Mundi Prize (2017)
• Honorary doctorate from University of the Arts London (2014)

Exhibitions

John Akomfrah has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Listening All Night to the Rain, British Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2024)
• Five Murmurations, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C (2023)
• John Akomfrah: Purple, The Curve, Barbican Centre, London (2017). Travelled to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); Museum Kurhaus, Kleve (2020);Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2022).
• John Akomfrah: Four Nocturnes, LUMA Arles, Arles (2021)
• John Akomfrah: Vertigo Sea, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (2020)

Group Exhibitions

• Coming Soon, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024)
• Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah (2023)
• Signals: Video and Electronic Democracy, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023)
• Family, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2021)
• Sixty Years: The Unfinished Conversation, Tate Britain, London (2021)
• Our World is Burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020)
• Water After All, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019)

Instagram

John Akomfrah’s Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

John Akomfrah’s artworks have been widely reviewed and discussed in leading art publications, including Artnet News, Frieze, and Plaster Magazine. In a conversation with Ocula Magazine, Akomfrah explained: ‘I think I was blessed to be part of a collective that started off making slide-tapes and looking at the histories of colonial fantasy for us to realise that there were these continuities that connected narratives across lines that were supposed to be clearly drawn—from novels to essays, films, travel writings, diaries, and letters.’

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Ocula | 2025