John Akomfrah

Sir John Akomfrah (born 4 May 1957 ) is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".

In an interview with Sukhdev Sandhu, Akomfrah said: "My dad was a member of the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah's party.... We left Ghana because my mum's life was in danger after the coup of 1966, and my father died in part because of the struggle that led up to the coup."

Handsworth Songs, the first documentary produced by the collective, with Akomfrah as director, focused on racial tensions in Britain in the 1980s.

Incorporating archive material and newsreel, and making experimental use of sound, Handsworth Songs won seven international awards, among them the BFI John Grierson Award for Best Documentary.

A founder of the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, he made his début as a director with Handsworth Songs (1986), which examined the fallout from the 1985 Handsworth riots.

Living in Britain since the age of eight, Akomfrah was educated at schools in West London and at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where he graduated in Sociology in 1982.

In 1982, he was one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, which was active until 1998, dedicated towards examining issues of Black British identity through film and media.

Handsworth Songs went on to win the Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1987.

With Lina Gopaul and David Lawson, his long-term producing partners, Akomfrah co-founded Smoking Dogs Films in 1998.

In the words of The Guardian, he "has secured a reputation as one of the UK's most pioneering film-makers [whose] poetic works have grappled with race, identity and post-colonial attitudes for over three decades."

John Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana, to parents who were involved with anti-colonial activism.

In 1998, together with Lina Gopaul and David Lawson, his long-term producing partners, Akomfrah co-founded Smoking Dogs Films.

From 2001 to 2007, he served as a Governor of the British Film Institute.

From 2004 to 2013, he served as a governor of the film organisation Film London.

Akomfrah has taught multiple courses at academic institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, New York University, Westminster University, and Princeton University.

Akomfrah was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to the film industry.

In March 2012, he was awarded the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margaret Award.

A tri-campus three-day event entitled "Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah" was held in November 2013 at the University of Toronto, where he was artist-in-residence.

A Harvard Film Archive critique of his work states: "Akomfrah has become a cinematic counterpart to such commentators of and contributors to the culture of the Black diaspora as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate and Henry Louis Gates. In doing so, he has continued to mine the audiovisual archive of the 20th century, recontextualizing these images not only by selecting and juxtaposing them but also through the addition of eloquent and allusive text."

Akomfrah's works are included in the permanent collections of museums worldwide such as the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among many others.

On 24 January 2023, it was announced that Akomfrah will represent the UK at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

Akomfrah has had solo presentations at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2022), Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2019), Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden (2015), Broad Art Museum, East Lansing (2014), Tate Britain, London (2013), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011) and the British Film Institute, in the BFI Gallery (2010).

In 2013 his major work The Unfinished Conversation, a multi-layered installation, was shown in Tate Britain for six months in 2013, and was acquired for the National Collection.

Marking its 10th anniversary, The Unfinished Conversation was remounted at the Midlands Arts Centre as part of the Birmingham 2022 festival.

In 2013, he was awarded honorary doctorates from University of the Arts London and from Goldsmiths, University of London.

In 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Portsmouth University, the reformed polytechnic from which he had graduated in 1982.

His 2015 work, Vertigo Sea, is a three-screen film installation that was shown at the 56th Venice Biennale in May 2015.

Vertigo Sea premiered in the UK at the Arnolfini in Bristol (16 January–10 April 2016) coinciding with an exhibition of new and recent work by Akomfrah being shown at Lisson Gallery.

In October 2016 his 40-minute two-screen video installation Auto Da Fé, filmed in Barbados and inspired by the theme of 400 years of migration and religious persecution, went on show.

Vertigo Sea premiered in the UK at the Arnolfini in Bristol (16 January–10 April 2016) coinciding with an exhibition of new and recent work by Akomfrah being sin Cardiff.

Purple (2017), a 62-minute, six-screen video installation commissioned for the prominent Curve Gallery space at the Barbican, London, Akomfrah describes as "a response to [the] Anthropocene".

A tie-in series of film screenings comprising selections made by Akomfrah was held from October 2017 at the Barbican Cinema.

The installation has travelled to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden; the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington DC; and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon.

In 2017, Akomfrah won the biennial Artes Mundi Prize, the UK's biggest award for international art, having been chosen for the award for his "substantial body of outstanding work dealing with issues of migration, racism and religious persecution", including his work Auto Da Fé.

Akomfrah said of his winning two-screen video installation, which explores the theme of mass migration over a 400-year period: "I wanted to focus on the fact that many people have to leave because something terrible is happening, it’s not just about leaving for a better life, many people feel they have to leave to have a life at all."

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worldwide George Floyd protests in 2020, Akomfrah began working on Five Murmurations (2021), a 55-minute, three-screen video, as a visual response to his sense that "it felt like there were almost two pandemics, overlapping, jostling and clashing with each other."

Akomfrah premiered the film in a solo presentation at Lisson Gallery in New York in 2021.

The film has since been shown in solo presentations at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, in 2022; and the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., in 2023.

In 2023, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Akomfrah debuted a new five-channel work titled Arcadia.

Reflecting on The Columbian Exchange – the widespread transfer of plants, animals, precious metals, commodities, populations, technology, diseases and ideas between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe from the 1400s onwards – the film was shown at the Sharjah Biennial before receiving its UK premiere at The Box in Plymouth where it is currently showing until 2 June 2024.