Meet the Artist: John Akomfrah in conversation with Alberta Whittle
Join us for our Meet the Artist event, featuring exhibiting artist John Akomfrah in conversation with fellow artist Alberta Whittle. Together, they will explore the ideas, themes and inspirations behind Akomfrah’s exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain. This is a unique opportunity to gain deeper insight into Akomfrah’s artistic practice, discover the concepts shaping his work, and hear two influential contemporary artists share their perspectives on art, culture and the world around us.
Alberta Whittle biography
Alberta Whittle (b. 1980 Bridgetown, Barbados) lives and works in Glasgow. After studying Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art, she completed a master’s degree at Glasgow School of Art in 2011. Alberta received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2024 and is currently a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
Her extensive range of exhibitions include a 2 person solo presentation at IMMA, Dublin (2026) and other solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York (2025), Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2024), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2024, with Dominique White); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2023); Holburne Museum, Bath (2023); Scotland + Venice, 59th Venice Biennale (2022); University of Johannesburg Gallery, Johannesburg (2021); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2021); Glasgow International (2021); Grand Union, Birmingham (2020); and Dundee Contemporary Arts (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaeton, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2026), Earth Matters, Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh (2026), Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024); Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2023); Soft and weak like water, 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2023); British Art Show 9 (2021–2022); Moving Bodies, Moving Images, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Black Melancholia, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2022); Sex Ecologies, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2021); and Life between islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s – Now, Tate Britain, London (2021).
Alberta has received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2022), a Turner Bursary (2020), Frieze Artist Award (2020), a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2020), and Margaret Tait Award (2018–19). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow; Arts Council Collection; Art Gallery of Ontario; The Contemporary Art Research Collection, Edinburgh College of Art; Glasgow Museums Collection; Government Art Collection; The McManus, Dundee; National Galleries of Scotland; and the University of St Andrews.
John Akomfrah biography
John Akomfrah is a hugely respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Born in 1957, Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside artist Lina Gopaul, and later joined by David Lawson, with whom he still collaborates today alongside Ashitey Akomfrah as Smoking Dogs Films.
Akomfrah’s work as a solo artist includes 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 experiences of migrants in the UK. In 2015, Akomfrah premiered his three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea (2015), which explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls ‘the sublime seas’. In 2017, Akomfrah presented his largest film installation to date, Purple (2017), at the Barbican in London, which addresses climate change, human communities and wilderness. He debuted Precarity (2017) at Prospect 4 New Orleans, following the life of forgotten New Orleans jazz trumpeter Charles 'Buddy' Bolden.
In 2018, Akomfrah participated in 14-18 Now, the UK-wide commemoration of the First World War, with his multiscreen installation Mimesis: African Soldier (2018). The following year he presented Four Nocturnes (2019) in the Ghana Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2023, he premiered two major five-channel pieces at the 15th Sharjah Biennial: Thinking Historically in the Present: Arcadia (2023), reflecting on ‘The Columbian Exchange’ between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe from the 1400s onwards; and Becoming Wind (2023), an allegorical representation of the Garden of Eden and its disappearance. His multichannel video installation Arcadia will be on view at the Natural History Museum in London until May 2027.