Why John Akomfrah's British Pavilion Is the Best Yet
Last week, the art world flocked to Venice in their thousands. As reviews pour in, good and bad, we cut through the noise to tell you why no other artist can do it like John Akomfrah.
Last week, the art world flocked to Venice in their thousands. As reviews pour in, good and bad, we cut through the noise to tell you why no other artist can do it like John Akomfrah.
Arriving at the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale is an experience like no other. Yes, quite a few different pavilions and Collateral Events have adopted the medium of film to communicate their point of view but few do it like John Akomfrah, who has managed to collate a total of 31 hours of footage displayed over 62 screens with his exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain. The unified thread between all of them? An exploration of Britishness through a multifaceted lens.
Owing thanks to the 11th-century Chinese writer Su Dongpo, whose poetry inspired the exhibition's title, Listening All Night to the Rain not only pulls on different parts of Britain but also Akomfrah's own artistic signature know-how of intricately weaving copious amounts of footage - images and forgotten newsreels mostly - into varying works that, in this show, see an anonymous narrator survey Britain's identifiable boundless landscape of field plains, mountainous hills and a cantankerous sky. In total, there are eight core film installations, all as rich as each other in their imagery and density that make it clear Akomfrah is an artist positively unafraid to unearth the worst depths or the greatest corners of British society.
Some of those depths - ones we're sure many would rather see left to history - include signs of racism so blatant that it's almost impossible to conjure a society accepting of such slogans. Ask any Londoner in their 70s what signs they remember from their youth and no doubt you'll hear the repeated phrase 'No Coloured, No Dogs, No Irish' - a sign that was proudly hung on many hotel doors up until the early 1960s. Sixty years on and such phrases are reborn again in Akomfrah's work, only instead of being juxtaposed by a crummy old hostel door in Finsbury Park, are left to rot in a stream of water characteristic of a breathtakingly beautiful Scottish landscape; the same majestic setting that inspired British artists of the highest ranking order: Gillies, Maxwell, Turner and Wordsworth. The words are dirty and plain nasty, however, the real-life horror hides in plain sight when you realise such occurrences like Brexit speak volumes of many people's deepest and darkest thoughts.
Continuing the artist's investigation into themes of memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change, the exhibition helps transform the British pavilion's space so that a necessary interrogation of relics and monuments of colonial histories can take place all through the notion of sound. In short, Listening All Night To the Rain is a spectacle of pure brilliance, but where it shines the brightest is in its divided segments, all of which tap into what has never before been a more divided Britain.
In an earlier statement to press, Akomfrah commented, 'I sense that one can know the world - that you can find a name, an identity and a sense of belonging - via the sonic', and thanks to the help of Shane Akeroyd associate curator Tarini Malik and the British Council, who commissioned the pavilion's exhibition, Akomfrah hasn't just achieved what he set out to do, he's gone beyond it.
