John Akomfrah, OBE, speaks on Trump, Brexit migration debates

by Rachel Ogbu//

In January Ghanaian-British video artist John Akomfrah was named the winner of 2017 Artes Mundi, the UK’s biggest prize for international contemporary art. The artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator used his new status to speak openly about the “bleak culture of fear and intolerance” in Britain.

“We are currently experiencing the worst discussion of migration I have lived through, in the 40 years I have observed these debates,” he said. “It feels bleak, it feels intolerant and it feels frightening,” he told The Guardian.

Akomfrah’s piece that won him the £40,000 Artes Mundi award is called Auto Da Fé which captured the age long issue of migration and refugees. “Most of the ideas in Auto Da Fé were really about saying to people: ‘You really have to consider the option that people are migrating literally to survive. They come here to be able to live because there isn’t an alternative anywhere else.’ And that seems to be an insight that has been lost,” he said.

60-year-old John Akomfrah was born to parents who were anti-colonial activists. In 2008 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to the film industry after he part founded the Black Audio Film Collective (1982- 1998) established to examining issues of Black British identity through film and media.

In his directorial debut, Akomfrah directed Handsworth Songs and it won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1987. The Guardian was impressed saying he “has secured a reputation as one of the UK’s most pioneering film-makers [whose] poetic works have grappled with race, identity and post-colonial attitudes for over three decades.”

In 2012 he won the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margaret Award and was awarded an honorary doctorate from University of the Arts London and Goldsmiths, University of London the following year in 2013. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from Portsmouth University, the reformed Polytechnic from which he had graduated in 1982.

“Trump I didn’t see coming but Brexit I did,” he said. “The unfinished conversations from the 1960s were always there. They were just given a body and a form in the debates that led up to Brexit. And I started to sense that in 2009 which is why I first started making these works.”

“You could hear it in the way people referred to migrants as ‘other’, portrayed as swarms of subhuman insects. Even at the lowest points of migration debates before, I had never heard that before. It felt like we had crossed a threshold of some kind and so I knew I needed to make works that offered a counter-narrative.”John Akomfrah

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