Artist talk: John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explore the experience of the African diaspora in Europe and the USA. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. Recent works include the three-screen installation “The Unfinished Conversation” (2012), a moving portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s life and work; Peripeteia (2012), an imagined drama visualising the lives of individuals included in two 16th century portraits by Albrecht Dürer and Mnemosyne (2010) which exposes the experience of migrants in the UK, questioning the notion of Britain as a promised land by revealing the realities of economic hardship and casual racism. Akomfrah’s latest work “Vertigo Sea” (2015), a three-screen film installation that explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls ‘the sublime seas’, has been on display as part of Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition ‘All the World’s Futures’ (2015) at the Venice Biennale, Italy.