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Power 100

Most influential people in 2025 in the contemporary artworld

27

John Akomfrah

Artist - Totemic figure in British art

27 in 2025

  • 202527
  • 202410
  • 202333
  • 201894
  • 2017
  • 2016
  • 2015
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© Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery

In the decade between his first showing of Vertigo Sea (2015), at the 56th Venice Biennale, and its reshowing this year at the Aichi Triennale, Akomfrah’s star has only risen. The relevance of his intricate, emotive multiscreen video installations probing the consequences of colonialism, migration and climate issues shows no sign of abating, and his aesthetics and thinking are clearly imprinting younger filmmakers. This year, the Black Audio Film Collective cofounder’s originally eight-installation exhibition Listening All Night to the Rain – which again originated in Venice, when Akomfrah represented the UK in 2024 – continued its tour, in different combinations, to the National Museum in Cardiff and Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, heading on to Liverpool and Dundee next year. His 2012 tribute to cultural-studies pioneer Stuart Hall, The Unfinished Conversation, was screened at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, and he continued to make new work: in November, The Hour of the Dog (2025), which, pointedly, parallels the civil rights era and our own time, debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

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