John Akomfrah: Listening all Night to the Rain / British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

Official description:
John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker whose work is an investigation into memory, racial injustice, the experiences of migrant diasporas and climate change.
Listening All Night To The Rain continues the artist’s preoccupation with themes of post-colonialism, ecology and the politics of aesthetics with a renewed focus on the act of listening and the sonic. The exhibition is seen as a manifesto that encourages the idea of listening as activism and is conceived as a single installation with eight interlocking and overlapping multi-screen sound and time-based works. Bodies of water are a central motif in Akomfrah’s exhibition and form a connective tissue that holds the many layered visual and sonic narratives together. Together with the sonic, Akomfrah explores the role of water in understanding our world and holding memory.
Open-ended in structure, the exhibition is reflective of the artist’s abiding interest in non-linear forms of storytelling and collage. The exhibition probes into the ways in which addressing and connecting vast historical narratives across five continents can then be reflected in the experiences of diasporic people in Britain.

John Akomfrah: Listening all Night to the Rain / British Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2024. April 19, 2024.