The London-based artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah was chosen to represent Britain at the Uk Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia with an exhibition focusing on the act of listening and the sonic.

Titled "Listening All Night To The Rain", the exhibition continues John Akomfrah’s investigation into themes of memory, migration, racial injustice, and climate change. The exhibition, conceived as a single installation with eight interlocking and overlapping multi-screen sound and time-based works, is seen as a manifesto that encourages the idea of listening as activism and positions various progressive theories of acoustemology: how new ways of becoming are rooted in different forms of listening. Encouraging visitors to experience the British Pavilion’s 19th-century neoclassical building differently, Akomfrah’s commission interprets and transforms the fabric of the space to interrogate relics and monuments of colonial histories.

Open-ended in structure, the alliterative nature of the exhibition is reflective of the artist’s abiding interest in non-linear forms of storytelling and collage. Listening All Night To The Rain repositions the role of art in its ability to write history in unexpected ways, forming both critical and poetic connections between different geographies and periods.

“Listening All Night To The Rain alludes to the performative power that the sonic will hold in the Pavilion. The final ensemble of installations, iterations of acoustemology, detours back to questions of memory and of the memorial but from a different vantage point, questioning the architectonics of the present and the specters of the past, with the idea of listening as activism in mind. I sense that one can know the world, that you can find a name, an identity, and a sense of belonging, via the sonic," said John Akomfrah.

John Akomfrah RA (born 1957) lives and works in London. He is known for his immersive multi-channel film installations, which explore major issues including racial injustice, colonial legacies, diasporic identities, migration, and climate change.

Akomfrah initially came to prominence in the early 1980s as part of the Black Audio Film Collective (Bafc), a collective founded in 1982. An early film by BAFC, titled Handsworth Songs (1986), explored the events around the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London. In recent years, Akomfrah’s work has evolved into ambitious, multi-channel installations presented in galleries and museums worldwide. In 2017, he won the Artes Mundi prize, the UK’s biggest award for international art. He has previously participated in the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with Four Nocturnes, commissioned for the inaugural Ghana Pavilion in 2019, and Vertigo Sea (2015) as part of the 56th International Art Exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor (‘All the World’s Futures’).

For more information visit www.labiennale.org