The Narrative Trespasser: An Interview with John Akomfrah for Listening All Night to the Rain, Lisson Gallery, New York – Whitehot Magazine
2 March 2026
Embracing connectivity, John Akomfrah’s Canto VI is a masterful exploration of the diverse and the disparate, without “reducing everything to a kind of sameness.” Premiering in the US at the Lisson Gallery, New York, Akomfrah’s sixth canto from his multi-channel series, Listening All Night To The Rain, offers a filmic reassessment of the threads of colonial history often subsidiary to mainstream narratives. Weaving together archival footage of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, with scenes from the 1947 Partition of India, and contemporary visuals, Akomfrah challenges narrative convention, prioritising marginalised and delegitimised voices. Sitting in the intimate space of the Lisson screening room, one enters an alternative historical flow, leaving as another strand in this sprawling channel of histories. I had the opportunity to speak with Akomfrah about the fallibility of knowledge, his advocacy for deep listening as a form of activism and the detrital aesthetic that characterises his latest work.
“But the caverns are less enchanting to the unskilled explorer / than the Urochs as shown on the postals / we will see those old roads again, question / possibly.” Ezra Pound’s rhythmic lyricism in The Cantos (1925) resonates throughout Akomfrah’s filmmaking. Pound’s song cycles drift, sigh, rise and fall, mirroring the ebb and flow of Canto VI's sonic pacing – shaped by Billy Holiday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’, metronomic beats, and the cacophony of crawling bugs. What fascinates Akomfrah about Pound’s choric style is his ability to “pull in diverse and disparate ranges of themes and feelings, emotions and references.” As The Cantos journey from the 14th to the 18th Centuries, Canto VI charts its course from the 1940s to the 1970s. This expansive approach allows Akomfrah to refer to the variety of things, encapsulating something “more discursive, more elusive”. Everything, from the rubber ducks floating down the river to archival footage of Britain’s Women's Liberation Movement, is “connected, but not completely the same.” Akomfrah becomes the “unskilled explorer” of Pound’s poetry; a man dropping into, what he terms, “zones of engagement”, unveiling their poetry, aesthetics, religions, and locales - all in the rhythm of his canto.
Read the full article by Grace Palmer for Whitehot Magazine here.
Image: John Akomfrah, Listening All Night To The Rain (Canto VI), 2024, 8 channel HD video installation with surround sound, © Smoking Dogs Films, © British Council, Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.
