A mannered look at Britain’s colonial past

John Akomfrah: Listening All Night to the Rain

British Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale

★★★★★

John Akomfrah’s new commission for the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale opens with a confident, wrong-footing intervention. Suspended before the building’s imposing 19thcentury façade, three large screens block the elevated threshold, forcing visitors to enter via the basement, around the back.

Given that Akomfrah’s work, since the 1980s, has interrogated the immigrant experience (he, himself, was born in Ghana in 1957, and moved to Britain when he was eight), it’s hard not to read this as an allusion to segregation, or an attempt to upend old social hierarchies. This year, everyone, no matter their skin colour or station, is obliged to use, as it were, the tradesman’s entrance.

There’s nothing cheap or workaday, though, about the pavilion’s interior. Akomfrah has decked out the rooms – each of which presents one of eight distinct, yet overlapping, multimedia and sound installations (or “cantos”, as he prefers) – with tastefully dark colours and plush drapes. It feels like walking into a high-end night spot or private members’ club – except that, instead of champagne and chit-chat, we’re offered an opportunity to engage with, as a wall text puts it, the “enduring legacies of colonialism”. Chin-chin!

Thus, on various screens arranged to resemble altarpieces, we encounter imagery of, say, golliwogs or sombre, motionless figures, wearing colourful raincoats, looking soulfully out to sea. Short introductions to each canto, picked out in gold against the walls, evoke historical moments to which Akomfrah’s installations supposedly refer, such as “the brutalities of the British counter-insurgency campaign”, following the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya – not that you’d necessarily know it, from the images on screen.

If this sounds polemical, it’s not. The atmosphere is melancholic and precious, not aggressive, and it is here, rather than with its content, that I take issue with Akomfrah’s work. There’s something so stately about his recent films, with their slow, lingering pans across sundry objects spuriously selected for their poetic qualities; every frame manifestly strains for effect.

As for Akomfrah’s claim that, here, he’s focusing on “the sonic”, and promoting a “manifesto” that encourages “listening as a form of activism”, it’s pretentious. Besides, the sounds we do hear are indistinct: mostly, a sort of low-level rumble, with lots of crackle (punctuated by bells and the occasional ticking clock), designed, I suppose, to generate a moody, dramatic atmosphere.

Instead, then, of feeling sorrowful about Britain’s past, I experienced impatience: everything is mannered, with little spontaneity or zip. Art doesn’t have to be this rarefied and self-regarding.

From Sat; labiennale.org

Pretentious: the British Pavilion’s commission evokes impatience, not sorrow