Ashitey Akomfrah

Listening All Night To The Rain

Listening All Night To The Rain continues John Akomfrah’s abiding interest in post-colonialism, ecology and the politics of aesthetics with a renewed focus on the sonic. Drawing its title from Chinese writer and artist Su Dongpo’s (1037 - 1101) poetry that meditates upon the transitory nature of life during a period of political exile, the exhibition is seen as a manifesto that encourages the act of listening as a form of activism. Conceived as a single landscape or artwork organised into song-like movements or ‘cantos’ that are inspired by American poet Ezra Pound’s (1885 - 1972) journey through history in The Cantos (1925), the exhibition brings together eight multimedia and sound installations.

Still We Thrive

A rich tapestry of image, music and poetry is interwoven in this powerful meditation on Black resilience.

The Giraffe

M is a woman Who lives alone. She suffers from insomnia and she needs someone to sleep with her. The process is the following: she finds different people to sleep with each time. She wants the touch of another body in her bed.

Precarity

A three-channel video installation, working with the themes of risk, hybridity and the unfathomable to explore the city of New Orleans through the remarkable life and times of Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the first person known to have explored the sonic tonalities of the music we now call jazz.

Purple

Purple is a six-channel video installation addressing climate change, human communities and the wilderness. At a time when greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are at their highest levels in history, with people experiencing the significant impacts of climate change, including shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather events, Akomfrah’s Purple brings a multitude of ideas into conversation. These include animal extinctions, the memory of ice, the plastic ocean and global warming. Akomfrah has combined hundreds of hours of archival footage with newly shot film and a hypnotic sound score to produce the video installation.