John Akomfrah worked with Artangel on Longplayer Assembly – joining 23 other participants in a non-stop 12-hour conversation relay presented live online on 26 September 2020, marking the twentieth anniversary of Longplayer.
Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality, and aesthetics. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, with whom he continues to collaborate. In 1986 their first film, Handsworth Songs explored the events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos, and newsreel. The film won several international prizes and established a multi-layered visual style that has become a recognisable motif of Akomfrah’s practice.
His work Vertigo Sea was exhibited at the 2015 Venice Biennale, exploring what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls ‘the sublime seas’. His largest film installation Purple, exhibited at The Barbican in 2017, addresses climate change, human communities and the wilderness.