Triptych (2020) is a homage to the the radical, political album, ‘We Insist!’ (1960) by the jazz musician Max Roach – the ideas of which prefigured the themes that became the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements. The catalyst for this film was the broadcasted portraits of figures such as...
Louis Armstrong is one of the most recognizable figures in jazz, with his incomparable trumpet playing and beaming smile. This video profiles Armstrong from his humble beginnings in New Orleans through his career as America's Ambassador of Good Will. Film clips, vintage photographs and interviews...
Vertigo Sea is a three-screen film installation that 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...
Goldie, the godfather of drum and bass takes us on a roller coaster ride through his frenetic life. A journey that takes us from Wolver Hampton to Tokyo, Miami to Hong Kong; through his years in council care and his life as a musician and international pop star. Along the way we meet his family,...
A homage to Russian film giant Andrei Tarkovsky, this work integrates excerpts of soundtracks from Tarkovsky’s films with a slideshow of landscapes shot by Akomfrah and an evocative sculptural installation. Working with long time collaborator, sound artist Trevor Mathison, Akomfrah creates an...
The Genome Chronicles is an epic investigation, unbounded by traditional notions of time, into the relationship between image and memory. Fusing personal archival material of Donald Rodney with newly shot footage and material from Smoking Dogs Films personal archive of images and textures to...
Transfigured Night draws its inspiration from two sources of the same name – Verklärte Nacht – the German poem by Richard Dehmel from 1896 and the musical composition by Arnold Schoenburg in 1899. Using the five-part structure of both the poem and the composition to reflect on the key moments...
Black filmmaker John Akomfrah believes that, for too long, being English has meant being white. In an attempt to show Englishness from the point of view of mixed-race English people, he visits Liverpool, one of England's oldest multicultural communities.
Commissioned for the inaugural Ghana pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Four Nocturnes (2019) forms the third part of a trilogy of films including the renowned Vertigo Sea (2015) and Purple (2017) that explore the complex intertwined relationship between humanity’s destruction of the natural world...
Produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates, Expeditions 2 – Images of Nationality is the second of a two-part 35mm slide- tape text entitled Expeditions; part one is entitled Signs of Empire. The work toured England from November 1984 to March 1985, using a Kodak dissolve...
Three-screen black and white video installation exploring how individuals and communities have been coping with the pandemic, the radical mobilization seen on the streets and the disruption of cycles of racism, and the increasingly urgent crisis of climate change.
A three-channel video installation, working with the themes of risk, hybridity and the unfathomable to explore the city of New Orleans through the remarkable life and times of Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the first person known to have explored the sonic tonalities of the music we now call jazz.
Tackling the ecological implications of settler colonialism, extractive capitalism and the extinction of microorganisms, this multi-screen installation digs into the oral as well as representational history of various Indigenous cultures.
Tropikos transforms the landscape of the Tamar Valley in the South West of England into a sixteenth-century port of exploration on the African continent in order to reveal the deep-rooted and darker history of the river and the UK’s role in the development and proliferation of the slave trade.
Part documentary, part personal essay, this experimental film combines archive imagery with the striking wintry landscapes of Alaska to tell the story of immigrant experience coming into the UK from the 1950s onwards.
