British Pavilion at Venice Biennale review: John Akomfrah’s migrant journey is epic

With 62 screens and 31 hours of footage, veteran video artist John Akomfrah’s Venice Biennale work, ‘Listening All Night to the Rain’, is a visual feast, exploring the best and worst of our country at a time when the notion of British identity has never been so contested

A still from John Akomfrah’s ‘Listening All Night to the Rain’, 2024 (© Smoking Dogs Films; Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery)

The prevailing response to much contemporary art may be “so what?”, but you can hardly accuse John Akomfrah of failing to provide weighty content. In a Venice Biennale dominated by superficially striking but essentially shallow displays – with a focus on indigenous cultures that feels a little too much like “this year’s thing” – the veteran multimedia artist’s British pavilion stands out for the sheer density and richness of the imagery deployed over eight meaty film installations.

Representing Britain in the world’s greatest art festival – what has been described as the “Olympics of art” – at a time when the country is more polarised than ever, the notion of “British identity” more contested than at any time in living memory, Akomfrah isn’t afraid to bring together the “best” and the “worst” of what our nation has to offer. One particularly resonant moment sets the tone: we see a sign bearing the words, “No Coloured, No Dogs, No Irish” dumped in a bubbling stream in a heartbreakingly beautiful Scottish landscape. A phrase embodying small-minded xenophobia, of the kind that confronted Afro-Caribbean immigrants looking for lodgings in 1950s London, is juxtaposed with the kind of majestic setting that inspired radical British artists of the order of Turner and Wordsworth.

Akomfrah, 66, who is of Ghanaian heritage, has won numerous honours – not least a knighthood – for multiscreen films that interweave archive and newly shot footage to powerful and haunting effect. The invitation to fill the British pavilion, previously issued to Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Jeremy Deller and Sonia Boyce, is the latest of those. One of Akomfrah’s greatest works, a three-screen tribute to the radical Jamaican-born academic Stuart Hall called The Unfinished Conversation (2011), left the viewer wondering where to focus their attention. But it was nothing compared to this work, entitled Listening All Night to the Rain and consisting of 62 screens showing 31 hours of footage.