Akomfrah began this year with twin honours: a knighthood and selection as the UK’s representative artist at the next Venice Biennale. Both plaudits underscored his achievements in moving image over the last four decades, since cofounding the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982 and directing the landmark Handsworth Songs (1986), a searing filmic collage that foreshadowed his career-long exploration of Black identity, postcolonialism and diasporic experience. While the BAFC’s importance becomes more widely acknowledged internationally, Akomfrah’s centrality to British art and film has been articulated over the past decade via increasingly ambitious and widely seen multiscreen installations, such as 2021’s engulfing ‘real-time archive’ Five Murmurations, exploring the entwined pressures of COVID-19, racial division and climate change. What visitors to his first overview show in Germany, at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, as well as his UK premiere of multiscreen film Arcadia (2023) at The Box, Plymouth, and the British Pavilion next year will discern is that the world going to hell in multiple handcarts is raising Akomfrah to the peak of his powers.
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Power 100
Most influential people in 2023 in the contemporary artworld
33
John Akomfrah
Artist - Black Audio Film Collective cofounder representing the UK in the next Venice Biennale
33 in 2023
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