Making the Moving Image: John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional
February 19, 2026
by Zindzi Harley, Cohort ‘24
Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.
"Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness" (1989), Bell Hooks (1952-2021)
We know ourselves as part and as a crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
"Poetics of relation" (1990), Édouard Glissant (1928-2011)
In the contemporary context, we often refer to the alchemy of photography and film as a craft of becoming, the makings of the moving and still image that imbue meaning, confront the viewer, and inquire into the depths of what a compelling image holds. I mean they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what happens when we let that very image roam in our imaginations – in practice? A text is produced, a vernacular that acts as a rosetta stone for our interpretation and dissemination of the nuance that is the human experience, unraveled through the tender and tedious work that is making the moving image. Esteemed British-Ghanian artist, John Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra, Ghana) cunningly demonstrates the active engagement that is making the moving image in his latest rendering, Listening All Night to the Rain at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional in collaboration with TBA21.
Beginning in the courtyard of the museum Canto I, first shown in the British Pavilion at the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale iconically entitled Foreigners Everywhere, a series of large screens guides viewers into the institution's doors, conceptually permeating the very structure of imperialism that Akomfrah critiques in his cinematic portrayals. Curated by Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, Tarini Malik, the exhibition located in the intimate sala of the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s lowest level, patrons can find the immersive viewing rooms, cloaked in colors inspired by paintings from the oeuvre of American artist Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), where moments captured by the artist turn into abstracted monuments of remembrance. The synergy of this exhibition and its introspection on the nuance of abstraction with the other temporary exhibition on view, Warhol Pollock, was a welcomed bridge from one spectrum of popular culture to critical culture.
In light of Akomfrah’s 2024 commissioning for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he reenvisions the framework of his video installation, Purple. Drawing inspiration from, Listening All Night To The Rain, a poem from the 11th century by exiled Chinese author Su Dongpo. The poem from which the exhibition takes its namesake ponders the “transitory nature of life” (Listening All Night To The Rain). Via a curated selection of artworks from the museum's collection that include modernist artists such as Joan Miro, Lucio Fontana, and Romare Bearden, a series of multi-channel video installations described as movements or “cantos” and soundscapes, Akomfrah directs a political screenplay, an expose of identities, historical happenings, and landmarks that represent the diversity of the British diaspora, unbound by a traditional temporal or narrative architecture. These five video installations explore racial injustice, history-making, migration, ecological shifts, and the legacy of colonialism with striking clarity and pitch; his transmissions are heard and the sound not only amplifies their reach, but provide an acoustemology, as coined by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld that describes how sound radically impacts our experience of the world.
Many philosophies can be extrapolated from Akomfrah’s cantos, particularly that of Edouard Glissant. A thinker whose conviction has always emerged at the intersection of relationality and globality, a conjunction that often leaves us in the hands of nature and nurture, the memory work that is discovering our place and purpose in an ecosystem that we possess as individuals and participate in as collective beings. Akomfrah’s approach to making his fictional films is this sentiment, burgeoning from crafted and found materials, archival documentation of geopolitical movements, clips of ecological erasure and displacement, soundbites of first hand accounts, rally cries, and calls for action, all assembled in a myriad of ways to produce new meaning and histories, visual hermeneutics that suspend time, space, and destiny in each frame, verse, and note. Akomfrah’s position as maker of history is dealing in decoloniality, the unfinished business of decolonization that has ravaged the psyche of the diaspora. By reimagining the concept of time and its entanglement with history, place, and people, he offers not only a response, but a way forward that acknowledges what has been done by whom and to whom.
Akomfrah’s majestical practice is one I describe as good vision, a compliment that I reserve for those who can bear the weight that it carries to see well. However, Akomfrah doesn't simply provoke us to see or witness; he asks us to listen. These acts are not unrelated, but a symphony, that when at its crescendo, is a force of activism unparalleled. An artist of his caliber only leads me to my own wandering visions. He prompts the question, what does it mean to be of the land, by the land, and for the land. Land as a place, a body, an object, a memory, and an action. Remembering our relationship to, sensation upon, location within land, and its relevance to our identity is necessary for our knowing and understanding of the stories we are told through, oral and visual traditions. Landing signifies a mental migration to and from temporal geographies of the mind, body, and soul that is life in past, present, and often futures we haven’t yet met, but envision in our hyper/hypo consciousness. Akomfrah affirms why we must make pictures, capture images, and communicate visual canons that access the land/lands/landings that remember and identify creation in all its forms fixed and fabulating to inquire with ourselves and our creator in light of systemic rupture, climate change, and history making because it is the water that heals, cleanses, and fuels us to continue the eternal migration of the land that is life.
If you won’t see Listening All Night To The Rain before it closes at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional February 8th you can experience it in North America where it will travel to Lisson Gallery in New York on view from February 11th to April 11th 2026.
Works Cited
John Akomfrah. Listening All Night To The Rain: Digital exhibition guide.” Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, online booklet, https://www.museothyssen.org/en/exhibitions/john-akomfrah-listening-all-night-rain/booklet. Accessed 22 January 2026.