'Multiple lives, one John Akomfrah' – Prospect Magazine
16 July 2024
The studio for Smoking Dogs Films, in London’s Wood Green, is essentially a large white box with a few small, offshoot offices partitioned by glass. It was almost entirely empty when I entered, save for a long white table in the central space where the artist John Akomfrah—in a black mandarin collar shirt, an olive scarf draped, louche, over one shoulder—had been holding court for the day, one journalist at a time.
This presentable emptiness belied the fact that the last five years have been a very busy time for Akomfrah: several new video installations, his first German retrospective. There has also been the matter of his gradual “acceptance” by Britain’s cultural establishment: admittance to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2019, a knighthood in 2023. Then there’s the reason we were speaking: his invitation from the British Council to represent Great Britain at this year’s 60th Venice Biennale.
One thing about Akomfrah not adequately captured by the glut of press photography that has come out since the Venice announcement—always stern, looking off into the middle distance, serious—is his natural garrulousness. “If you had been here just a few hours before, you could’ve taken some fruit away with you!” he laments, gesturing to the empty crates stacked beside us. The fruit, most of it tropical, was used as part of another photoshoot; he alludes to some connection to his Venice installation. Speaking with him in March, a month ahead of the opening, Akomfrah was unable to talk in detail about the Biennale work just yet. For the time being, I was left to make what I could of these oblique references.
In the conceptual framework devised by the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall in a 2004 lecture, Akomfrah—who frequently cites Hall as a major influence, having made two films about him and his ideas—would sit within the second of three “moments” of postwar black diasporic art. Unlike the first, composed of those born in the colonies who arrived in the UK as adults via routes such as Windrush, the second came mostly as young children and were educated here. (The third moment, the British-born children of the second, was at that time still coming of age.) As such, Akomfrah’s concern as an artist is how to straddle this world between worlds, where homeland is not simply an abstract past filled by dead ancestors but somewhere firmly planted within living memory. What kind of identity is forged by those who do not belong fully anywhere? What does it mean for identity to be fluid yet also intangible? For Hall, identity was the unfinished conversation, a push-and-pull with the soul, a kind of dialectic of the self. Akomfrah, through his art and film, has made it his life’s work to keep that conversation going.
Read more of the interview via Prospect Magazine here.
