John Akomfrah: Listening All Night To The Rain

Since the 1980s, John Akomfrah has been exhibiting poetic ruminations and aesthetic interventions around race. In more recent years, he has become aware of the Anthropocene – the current geological age in which humans have been a major factor in the climate and environment – and realised that its significance lies not in its political implications alone but in the ethical, aesthetic, and formal questions it poses to artists and makers. This exhibition, co-produced by TBA21, an arts foundation established in 2002, and curated by Tarini Malik who worked on his 2024 Venice British Pavilion contribution, draws its name from an 11th-century poem by the Chinese poet Su Dongpo, composed during his political exile, which contemplates life’s ephemerality. The gallery preceding Akomfrah’s works has a display of works from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza collection that are in sympathetic alignment with the videos. Joan Miró’s Catalan Peasant with a Guitar (1924) resonates with Akomfrah’s exploration of diasporic figures and their musical traditions. Meanwhile, Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas Venice Was All Gold (1961) reflects the artist’s interruptions of cinematic time and critiques of imperialism. The intentional abstraction in Oskar Schlemmer’s Formation Tri-Partition (1926) echoes Akomfrah’s choreographed scenes, while Stuart Davis’s jazz-inspired Pochade (1956-1958) embodies the rhythmical quality of his editing. In Romare Bearden’s Sunday After Sermon (1969), collage emerges with a political resonance, mirroring Akomfrah’s assembly of voices and images into enduring narratives. Yves Klein’s Dying Slave (after Michelangelo) (1962) aligns with Akomfrah’s ghostly elements, reinterpreting the body outside the confines of linear history.

Akomfrah’s exhibition, which the artist describes as post-cinematic and reflective of Black thought, starts in the garden of the museum. Canto I opens with images and voices from the Global South, bringing attention to the impact of colonialism, climate change, and forced migration. Water – shown as mist, rain, and sea – flows through the piece as both a reminder of the journeys of displaced communities and a symbol of how time ebbs and shifts. The theme of time is portrayed with the image of a clock floating in the river as if to point out time is running out to mitigate the climate crisis. A bell tolls in the dying minutes of that piece as if presaging a watery environmental catastrophe. It’s affecting and it’s rare that video art can penetrate the pysche, touch the modern viewer, make them ponder what they’ll do when the dam breaks, the floods come, the heat becomes unbearable.

Canto IV takes viewers to a shoreline filled with strange and everyday objects: vegetables, butterflies, rubber ducks, even broken listening devices. We get a mesmerising sequence beneath the waves of schools of fish which dart to the sounds of sea shanties, recalling histories of exploration and labour. At one point a copy of Rachel Carson’s ‘The Sea Around Us’ comes into view. Published in 1950, this is a book fusing lyricism and science in charting the ocean’s history, looking at how the earth and moon were formed as well as how life emerged, then ends with an exploration of the forces shaping marine environments. I am not surprised that Akomfrah, who has spent the last few years, using his art to speak to you, to me, to all of us about how we are connected to the land and the ocean, would see this book as his lodestar. In a conversation with Tarini Malik, he states, ‘What I can tell you with the work is within this Anthropocenic space in which we are, the deluge has risen and the question of salvaging something from the forthcoming apocalypse is essential.’

A young Inuit woman and a dockworker appear alongside archival images, blurring past and present. This brings to mind another poetic statement he made in that conversation, ‘I try to commandeer the space between lives lived and lives imagined, I’m trying to navigate the space between the two.’ I’ve always loved Akomfrah’s way with words, how he moulds them for his purposes the way an Ibo sculptor uses his adze to shape large planks.

Canto VII focuses on postwar Britain and the Windrush generation, who came from the Caribbean to rebuild the country after 1948. Everyday family scenes are contrasted with the racism and hardship migrants faced. Again, schools of fish move rapidly and then we are presented with shots of people standing by themselves in landscapes in Yorkshire and Scotland, as well as cityscapes consisting of high rises which people gaze at. Speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Angela Davis connect these stories to global calls for justice. The last shot has a mournful air as we see water gushing from a waterfall and washing over a clock and metronome.

The show continues with Canto VI, which looks back at independence movements in Africa and Asia during the mid-20th century. From the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya to the Partition of India and the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the work connects these struggles to the memories of Britain’s diasporic communities, showing how the effects of colonialism still shape lives today. I love certain images here: segments showing ballerinas pirouetting juxtaposed with archival footage of adults and kids dancing at some kind of gathering.

Canto VIII closes the cycle with a sobering look at war and its environmental costs. The opening shot is of clocks submerged in what appears to be a stream and we hear metronomes. From the Korean War to Vietnam, images of bombings and pesticides reveal how conflict devastates not only people but entire landscapes. Alongside this, dreamlike images of bodies and objects highlight the fragility of life and the urgency of listening to environmental warnings. It ends with someone looking at woodland while a drone with a forbidding sound is played.

Akomfrah struggles with deciding between longer shots that enable the viewer to be immersed in what they are watching, and shorter scenes that facilitate a ‘machine-like rhythm’ and while I admire the labour involved in finding the archival footage and marrying them to new scenes, I do wonder if the films, each half an hour long, might have had even greater impact if he reduced the number of things shown, but focused for longer on each fragment. What the cantos have in common are haunting, stylised tableaux, dream-like scenes in which the motifs of the clock, metronome, and water recur. The six-screen format mobilises not just simple juxtapositions, but orchestrated encounters. It is fascinating how this strategy enables decentralisation of singular agency and historical narrative, breaking down the “sovereignty” of linear historical progression and unified perspectives.

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John Akomfrah / Listening All Night To The Rain is exhibited from 4 November 2025 to 8 February 2026 at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

Reviewed for Photomonitor by Akin Oladimeji