John Akomfrah: Listening All Night To The Rain
For winter 2026, we will present John Akomfrah’s profound exhibition Listening All Night To The Rain, which continues the artist and filmmaker’s investigation into themes of memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change. The work debuted at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia before traveling to Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Cardiff in 2025. Akomfrah’s immersive audio-visual works will fill both galleries at DCA, inviting audiences on a journey of sights and sounds that draw out specific moments in time and events in our collective histories. By listening, watching and engaging with the pieces, audiences are encouraged to listen as a form of activism against historic and enduring injustices. Listening All Night To the Rain by John Akomfrah was commissioned by the British Council for the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Co-commissioner Lisson Gallery, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Smoking Dogs Films.
The Commission and UK Tour of Listening All Night To The Rain is supported by Art Fund.
About John Akomfrah
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. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today alongside Ashitey Akomfrah as Smoking Dogs Films.
Their first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos, newly shot material and newsreel. The film won several international prizes and established a multi-layered visual style that has become a recognisable motif of Akomfrah’s practice. Other 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 experiences of migrants in the UK, questioning the notion of Britain as a promised land by revealing the realities of economic hardship and casual racism. In 2015, Akomfrah premiered his three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea (2015), which explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls ‘the sublime seas’. Fusing archival material, readings from classical sources and newly shot footage, Akomfrah’s piece focuses on the disorder and cruelty of the whaling industry and juxtaposes it with scenes of many generations of migrants making epic crossings of the ocean for a better life. 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. More recently, Akomfrah 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 the UK wide World War One arts programme 14-18 Now, with his multiscreen installation Mimesis: African Soldier (2018), which commemorated African and colonial participants who fought, served and perished during The Great War. In 2019 Akomfrah presented Four Nocturnes (2019) in the Ghana Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, a three-channel piece reflecting on the intertwined relationship between humanity’s destruction of the natural world and of ourselves. 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.