John Akomfrah’s immersive and visual works consider migration and diasporic communities through the media of film. Now, in new work for the Venice Biennale, commissioned and managed by the British Council, Akomfrah is dissecting a historical narrative through an auditory lens, putting sound at the centre of his new piece, Listening All Night To The Rain.
‘I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he says. ‘It’s about acknowledging connections with other species, and each other. We’re cautioned to listen to rising water levels, CO2 emissions – there are a lot of voices begging to be listened to. It felt like a good moment to just bring up some of the past. [The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’
Akomfrah will be revisiting his distinctive multi-layered style in the new work, with an installation composed of eight intersecting and overlapping screens emphasising the power in sound and listening, both as a tool for activism and for their ability to prompt an emotional connection. ‘The sense of recall that the sonic affords you feels much more connected to the past in some way,’ he adds. ‘Images can feel slightly disembodied, unconnected to the moment of origination, whereas the sonic somehow feels as if it’s still attached in some weird way to that moment.’
The vast proportions of Akomfrah’s intersecting multi-screen installation had to be reconsidered to work with the spatial requirements of the British Pavilion’s 19th-century neoclassical building. ‘Every time you venture into a new space, you’re deciding on the form it will take. You become aware that you’re going to have to renegotiate. I think the forms we come up with for the Pavilion, with its emphasis on repetition and doublings, miniaturising the screens, all of that will make a difference. No space [in Venice] is that big, but that’s cool.’
A version of this article appears in the May 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print from 11 April, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.
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The Venice Art Biennale 2024 will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November
