The Manton Centre for British Art Lecture: Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA

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The Courtauld is delighted to host Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA for the second Manton lecture with the artist in conversation with Professor Dorothy Price FBA, an annual event supported by the Manton Foundation as part of the Manton Centre for British Art.  

John Akomfrah is a major figure in the landscape of British art and film, as the maker of a series of acclaimed multi-layered moving-image works. He has been recognised internationally as a groundbreaking and pioneering artist filmmaker in pushing the boundaries of film, the documentary form, and multi-screen installations which takes as their focus memory, postcolonialism and the nature of time, often exploring the experience of global migrant diasporas. His work has appeared in numerous international exhibitions and features in major museums collections. In 2024, he represented Britain with a new body of work entitled Listening All Night to the Rain commissioned by the British Council for the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.  

Akomfrah is a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982–98), a group of seven Black British and Black diaspora multimedia artists and filmmakers who were responding to the social unrest in Britain in the 1980s and pushing the boundaries of the documentary form. Akomfrah still collaborates with the artists Lina Gopaul, David Lawson, and Trevor Mathison, with whom he founded the collective, and with Gopaul, Lawson and Ashitey Akomfrah as part of Smoking Dogs Films. BAFC’s first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored the events surrounding the riots of 1985 in Birmingham and London. The film won several international prizes and established a multilayered visual style that has become a standard of Akomfrah’s practice. Other notable works include the three-screen installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a moving portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s life and work, Four Nocturnes (2019), the final part of a trilogy of films, including Vertigo Sea (2015) and Purple (2017) that reflect on the existential threat of ecological disaster. In 2023, he premiered two major five channel films at the 15th Sharjah Biennial: Arcadia (2023), reflecting on ‘The Columbian Exchange’ between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe from the 1400s onwards; and Becoming Wind (2023), an allegorical representation of the Garden of Eden and its disappearance. The Menil Collection, Houston and the Baltimore Museum of Art recently commissioned Akomfrah resulting in an immersive multichannel video installation entitled The House of the Dog (2026). 

Organised by Indie A. Choudhury, Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art, Global Black Diasporas & Black Studies and Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art.