Artist and filmmaker, John Akomfrah presents his first solo exhibition in China at Lisson Gallery Beijing, with the artist’s three-channel film installation, The Airport (2016), a three-screen film installation conceived as a meditation on the history of Greece, the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and its aftermath. The exhibition follows the premiere of two major new commissions for Sharjah Biennial in February 2023, and the announcement that Akomfrah will represent Great Britain at the 2024 Venice Biennale – following his participation in the inaugural, critically acclaimed Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Earlier this year, Akomfrah was awarded a knighthood in the King’s New Year UK Honours List, after receiving a CBE in 2017.
The Airport (2016) is an elliptical, immersive, 53-minute film installation that follows a spaceman who lands in Southern Greece and adopts an abandoned airfield near Athens as his base. The film is populated by displaced and enigmatic characters, including an elderly man in a tuxedo suit who re-lives moments from his past and his future, a wandering astronaut, a marauding gorilla, and forlorn travelers. Taking its cue from the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos and his long sweeping shots, Akomfrah uses tracking shots of the landscape of Athens and Southern Greece. Through these dreamscapes the film contemplates the significance of empires and the ghosts which linger in our collective consciousness, both physically through architecture and the psychological traces from previous generations.
Accompanied by a mesmerizing soundtrack, the film’s narrative weaves together cinematic, literary, philosophical, and artistic traditions, where spaces of human ruin and natural beauty abound. In particular, Akomfrah recalls the work of two filmmaking greats: Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) and Theo Angelopoulos (1935–2012). The film’s elastic sense of time references Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while Angelopoulos’s technique of constant movement between camera, characters, and locations is also employed to a poetic effect.
The Airport followed other hugely influential films by Akomfrah, who came to prominence in the 1980s as a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective. For the past 40 years, Akomfrah has used film to challenge conventional histories and confront topics from post-colonialism, Black identity and the diasporic experience, to migration and our destruction of the planet. Known for his use of montage and bricolage techniques, Akomfrah’s films are characterised by a multi-layered approach that fuses archival film footage, newsreel and still photography with newly shot materials. Blending imagery across time and place, Akomfrah embraces the philosophy of dialectics and constructs complex cinematic experiences that invite us to reflect on historical narratives with a critical lens.
