Taking its title from the eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Dongpo — who wrote of listening to rain through the night during a period of political exile — Listening All Night To The Rain is John Akomfrah’s most ambitious and experimental work to date.

Commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, the installation unfolds across eight immersive ‘cantos’: interlocking channels of film, image, text and sound that draw on hundreds of international archive collections to map the entangled histories of postcolonialism, forced migration and ecological destruction. Newly filmed material is juxtaposed with archival imagery in Akomfrah’s signature style of bricolage — surreal and dreamlike tableaux alongside documentary footage, personal and collective memory held in the same frame.

Water runs through the work as connective tissue. It appears as mist, rain, open sea and flood; it moves as sound moves, in waves and dispersals, tracing the routes of diaspora across time and geography. The work draws on the concept of ‘acoustemology’ — a portmanteau of acoustic and epistemology coined by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld — proposing that the sonic is not merely atmosphere but a means of knowing and connecting across human and non-human worlds.

The cantos traverse pivotal histories: the Windrush generation, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the partition of India, the independence movements that swept Africa and Asia from the 1940s to the 1970s, the ecocide wrought by the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Woven through these wider histories are the voices of the marginalised — women, migrants, indigenous peoples — alongside fragments from speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Angela Davis. Altarpiece-like in their sculptural installation, the screens invoke the sacred alongside the political.

Listening All Night To The Rain positions listening as a form of activism, and art as testimony against forgetting.