If I’d met him 50-odd years ago, John Akomfrah says, with the infectious giggle that punctuates his conversation, two words would have sprung immediately to my mind: “Black nerd.” He was the kid at school who soaked up every bit of cultural learning going, who always had his head in a book on the bus. There was, of course, he says, “some connection between the hostility of the outside world in the 1960s and 1970s and the refuge kids like me found in books. I was always looking for things that allowed you to imagine this place otherwise. That’s why I loved going to the Tate Gallery as a child; that’s why I loved going to the cinema,” he smiles again. “And don’t forget, television wasn’t exactly a refuge for a Black kid in the 1970s…”
If Akomfrah, now a youthful 66, sponged up that culture in his formative years, the past four decades have seen him reinventing it, in artistic film-making that is constantly curious to re-evaluate imagined pasts. In this way, Sir John – he was knighted in last year’s New Year’s honours – never stops making sense of the political present. With the news agenda full of postcolonial insanity – a Tory government pinning its desperate election hopes on deporting 300 refugees to Rwanda – he feels like the wisest of choices to represent the nation at this month’s Venice Biennale.
When I meet him at his studio – two warehouse-sized floors in Wood Green, north London – he is being trailed by a film crew from the British Council, the body that selected him to create this year’s British pavilion. Akomfrah has always led collaborative teams: in his 20s he was the leading light of a group called the Black Audio Film Collective with fellow travellers from Portsmouth Poly; since 1998, his art has been produced through Smoking Dog Films, with two survivors of that group, his friend David Lawson and his partner Lina Gopaul.
While I wait for him to finish filming, I chat with Lawson in a side studio. He flicks through some of the photographs they have been looking at – archival material is key to Akomfrah’s work – from the former Belgian Congo and 1950s Britain. He agrees that he and Akomfrah and Gopaul share a pretty telepathic understanding. “We’ve known each other since 1982,” he says. “And we always know the work that has got to be done, the histories we are covering, the sort of synapses that we have got to make connect.”
And no doubt they always agree on what will work?
He laughs uproariously.
Akomfrah’s art is all about juxtaposition, placing stories and images from the present and from long ago and letting them start conversations. He works with split screens on gallery walls, allowing the viewer to make leaps between the images and ideas that he surfaces. When he sits down opposite me, he confirms with an apology that he’s not able to talk about the detail of his plans for Venice, including a new immersive film, Listening All Night to the Rain, embargoed until opening. “Though I mean,” he says, “it’s not going to be a surprise to anyone that there are certain questions I will be raising. Because they have always been the staple of the work. Questions of memory and of our national past will figure, particularly through what I call this lens of deep listening.” There is a lot of strident white noise around just now, Akomfrah suggests: his films try to tune into deeper frequencies – the 11th-century Chinese poet Su Dongpo is one departure point for the Venice work.
There is an easy intensity about Akomfrah as a person. He is happy to engage in freewheeling chat, but he can turn up the intellectual rigour on cue. His conversation, like his films, takes in a range of references to what he calls constant influences – Virginia Woolf, say, “never goes away”; film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky likewise. And then there are the reference points currently on his mind. “So for Venice,” he says, “suddenly Rothko, who I hadn’t properly thought of for decades, kept coming up. I’ve learned to follow those thoughts: what is it that’s making Rothko important? Or what is it that’s making Ezra Pound – bizarrely – suddenly interesting to me again?”
A constant theme of his work, that feels personal as well as political, is a sense of uprootedness or displacement, a loss of innocence. In his 2010 film The Nine Muses, a full-length meditation on migration, he quotes, as elsewhere, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; knowing even the outline of his own biography gives an emotional freight to that borrowing. Akomfrah’s parents had been prominent figures in the African independence movement in their native Ghana that brought Kwame Nkrumah to power, with his utopian vision of pan-African socialism. In 1966, when the CIA-backed plot to overthrow Nkrumah ended in a military coup, Akomfrah’s father was killed, and, aged nine, Akomfrah was forced with his mother to flee the country, first to the US and then to London.
Thinking back to that time, I wonder if the years before those horrors had an Edenic quality in his memory?
“It certainly felt like that immediately after it ended,” he says. “I remember the day of the coup, the announcements that were on the radio. One of the military guys said: ‘These kids, they lack discipline! Now we will cane them!’ I remember thinking: ‘Like, really? That’s what you came to power for, to beat kids?’ We’d never heard talk like this. So yeah, what came before did feel like a paradise.”
The death of your father obviously compounded that agonising sense of loss?
“Of course. And I remember very, very powerfully, that sense that everything good had turned bad. We were in danger. You knew as a kid there were people outside the house saying, we’re coming to get you. I couldn’t wait to be elsewhere.”
Akomfrah told a story to the New York Times, of how before they left Accra they went to say goodbye to his grandfather, the patriarch of the Akomfrah clan. The old man, the story went, wore a ring passed down through generations, which represented the power to bring order to life’s chaos. His grandfather did not pass the ring on to him, as might have been expected; instead the old man swallowed it. Akomfrah took that to mean that his grandfather believed the ring’s power was at an end. You might see Akomfrah’s artistic career as a continual act of defiance against that belief.
He has spent a lot of his life examining ideas of escape and refuge; the latter term clearly carries a powerful emotional charge for him. It originally meant a new home in the shadow of Battersea power station in south London.
“Oh my God!” he says, recalling that sanctity. “London was cold and all that, and it became something else afterwards, but certainly initially, this was like, again, a paradise.”
His mother, who had lost everything, did her best to retain that feeling for him. “It was quite something to watch these women who had lost husbands in wars or coups suddenly here with kids and trying to find ways of adjusting, doing backbreaking work to survive. It’s why I’ve never taken things like reading for granted, because I know how precious it was. I grew up among a lot of people who didn’t have the time to do it.”
After that beginning, London “became something else” gradually. “I always talk about it as a ‘slow encounter with my doppelganger’,” he says. “For a while, the things you hear seem to be about somebody else, this double of yours. And then at some point, you realise with a shock it’s you they are talking about. You are the mugger, you are the foreigner, whatever.”
Before any anger at this realisation, he says, “there was disenchantment that grew out of the feeling that something you love – Britain – does not love you. And then once you’ve come out of the space of hurt, you think: OK, I need to start saying something.”
Akomfrah’s first film with the collective, back in 1983, was called Signs of Empire and included a quote from a Tory MP, former secretary of state for the colonies Duncan Sandys, talking about second-generation immigrants from the Commonwealth: “They don’t know who they are, or what they are.” “Our films were saying,” Akomfrah recalls, “you are quite wrong about that, mate.”
That understanding came partly through a recognition of absence. “If you wander around the Tate Gallery for years and years, as I did,” he says “at some point it’s going to dawn on you: I’m not here. There is no representation of people like me.”
In this respect, he agrees, it feels extraordinary for him to be a part of shows like the current, fabulous exhibition Entangled Pasts at the Royal Academy in London, which reappraises that institution’s relationship with colonial history, or Tate Britain’s rehang that confronts the gallery’s foundations in the slave trade. His generation of artists, including Sonia Boyce (winner of the Golden Lion at Venice last time around) and Keith Piper have been instrumental in forcing that change. “And without that sense that we were quote, unquote, missing [from galleries] we would never have done anything,” he says.
Did it always feel as if you had an opportunity to make that mark, to fill that space?
“Yes. But not because you suddenly stopped loving Turner or admiring Constable. It was just the feeling that another layer of pigment needed to be added to this kind of canvas, and that was you.”
The late cultural critic Stuart Hall, who became a close friend and mentor, was pivotal in framing some of those thoughts for Akomfrah. Before Hall died in 2014, Akomfrah made a pair of wonderful films about his life and ideas, The Unfinished Conversation and The Stuart Hall Project, as a way of acknowledging that debt. “It was only when I started to look at Stuart’s archive at the BBC,” Akomfrah says, “that I realised that this guy had been tracking my generation from when we were born; he understood that whatever happened in this country, we were going to play some major role in it.”
The first expression of that role was Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio Film Collective’s 1986 reflection on recent riots in Birmingham. Speaking to the Guardian after that film came out, Akomfrah suggested that at a time of peak racial tension “we wanted to find a way in which images of race could be brought into a meditative, reflective arena… to build up a series of alliances that stretches from, say, a community centre in Hackney to a kind of European festival circuit”. The group was steeped in film-making discourse, some from European new wave cinema, some from radical film-making in the developing world and civil rights-era America. Their ambition was nothing less than “the reformulation of the agenda of Black politics in this country”.
The film, which set footage of the unrest and police violence alongside images from colonial and industrial history, was an attempt to change the pace and tone of debate about race in this country. Salman Rushdie famously took issue with it in the Guardian, in particular Akomfrah’s belief that “there are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”: “the buzz about the film is good,” Rushdie wrote. “People are calling it multilayered, original, imaginative, its director John Akomfrah is getting mentioned around town as a talent to watch. [But] unfortunately it’s no good…”
Stuart Hall responded by castigating Rushdie for missing “the struggle it represents: to find a new language… to break with the tired style of the riot-documentary”. The writer and activist Darcus Howe, meanwhile, welcomed this mature critical attention of Black British film-makers’ work: “Rushdie simply says that the attempt to shape a new language does not work…” he wrote. “And I am certain that the film-makers will take that on board.”
Akomfrah did and didn’t take on board Rushdie’s arguments for more journalistic specificity about Black British lives. He has never been interested in straight narrative storytelling; he has instead found disturbing and poetic ways to deconstruct historical myth, to get under the skin of current debate. There is a prophetic quality to several of the films. If you look back at Nine Muses, for example, the film feels like a necessary preface to the Windrush scandal.
“I think what happens is that you get a sense that a question needs to be raised,” he says. “And if it’s true, then at some point that takes on a life of its own. When we started the Nine Muses it was with the idea that the Windrush generation was disappearing. It felt as if they were so unacknowledged that they deserved a kind of epitaph. But as soon as we did that, the rumblings for what became the Windrush scandal started.”
The shock of that story, he suggests, was that issues around citizenship that seemed resolved were obviously not. “I didn’t think that there could still be a home secretary and a Home Office still concerned about making this place a hostile environment for Black people.”
He has a gift for finding the telling images to open up these ideas. In the Getty archive, he says, he’s just come across a picture of Enoch Powell in a van, making a byelection speech about immigration. “And around the van,” he says, “are three young Black kids and three young white kids who are clearly all friends. They’ve all picked up a leaflet from Enoch Powell. And you can see them looking at it and looking at each other really bewildered. What’s going on?”
His own answer to that question long ago became: more than one thing. The multiple screens of his work emphasise the ethical and political point that there is always more than a single story, much as nationalists might try to insist on one “patriotic” thread.
“For example,” he says, “when I was researching slave ships it was a really big thing for me to realise that many of them were basically customised whaling ships. Having [depleted one resource] they just changed cargo to what was more profitable. So you find these affinities, often dark, that exist between subjects.”
During the pandemic he became fascinated by the congruence in the spread of fears about the virus and the advance of the Black Lives Matter movement. He wasn’t able to go on the march in London that, in effect, broke social distancing rules after the death of George Floyd – Akomfrah had pneumonia – but he was alive to its energies. The result was another film, Five Murmurations, which examines the forcefield of anxiety in that period: “I can’t breathe.”
One powerful section of that film sets the images of Floyd’s murder against the Mantegna’s Renaissance painting of the dead Christ and news footage of the death of Che Guevara.
“The film of Floyd’s murder felt like a crucifixion, or an event staged in the language of art history,” Akomfrah says. “The passion of George Floyd. If you are familiar with art history you couldn’t not think of it in those terms.”
The echoes were intended, he says, to open up questions about that iconography of suffering, rather than to present any narrow polemic or argument. I’m “interested”, he likes to say, “in the ways in which unseen guests arrive at parties”, the power of unconscious association.
It seems no coincidence that this kind of metaphorical practice should seem such a powerful corrective to political imagery just now. Akomfrah’s 2015 film Vertigo Sea, for example, weaves a history of human immigration into themes of environmental pollution, in ways that pre-empt rightwing attacks on “wokery” and the science of the climate crisis. When he made that film, that rhetoric hadn’t hardened into Brexit and GB News, but he knew it was coming.
“The original plan was to do a project called The Boat,” he says. “We had become aware that there were these places in west Africa where people were gathering, having walked across the Sahara from Libya or wherever, and then trying to get on to boats to Europe. I had the idea to do the whole journey, and then get on a boat with them.”
It quickly became clear that the risks involved were too high, an instance of imagination foundering on brutal reality. “I think initially, it felt like a kind of Odyssean project, but we quickly realised it was something much darker, less Greek. And the conditions that were forcing people to flee in that way had got worse, not better.” He knew that at some point, “since the obsession with migration has always been with numbers”, that the wave would reach Dover and “start to dictate the political rhetoric” here.
Still, he says, that did not prepare him for the “surreal quality of the Rwanda fiasco, in which politicians of colour are leading the conversation. Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, that whole Tory elite of Black and Asian politicians. I used to think they were ventriloquised in some way, by other forces bigger than themselves. But at some point, you have to believe: no, this is actually them speaking.”
He has a take on that narrative that rarely gets an airing these days, but which is no less true. “It never ceases to surprise me why the obviousness of what’s going on isn’t presented,” he says. “These young men risking their lives on the boats, they’ll be anything from 20 to 30. Which means that they are figures of incredible investment. Somebody’s given birth to these kids, brought them up, spent money on them. They are a colossal loss for the place they have left… I never understand why it is not presented for what it is: a story of third world subsidy for advanced economies.”
Perhaps that is one of the ideas that will be floated in Venice. Before I go, I wonder if he is daunted at all by the prospect of representing his fractured nation at this moment (though he has shown work at the Biennale before, including in the Ghana pavilion in 2015).
“Of course,” he says, “but that is absolutely as it should be. I mean, all those years when I went to the Biennale and felt maybe ‘this isn’t quite as hard as it looks’, I now know the truth. It’s difficult, because the building itself is a challenge. And trying to think about how to arrange things that’s different from Gilbert and George or Chris Ofili or Sonia Boyce.”
Those ghosts of past again; as he knows as well as anyone, they don’t go away.
• This article was amended on 7 April 2024 because an earlier version conferred an incorrect description of “London MP” on the writer and activist Darcus Howe.
