UK Audiences
NATIONAL MUSEUM CARDIFF AND DUNDEE CONTEMPORARY ARTS AMONG THE UK MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES TO HOST THE EXHIBITION FROM 2025 WITH SUPPORT FROM ART FUND
Art Fund, the UK’s national charity for art, and The British Council have today announced that John Akomfrah’s commission for the British Pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale will be coming to UK audiences from 2025.
Listening All Night To The Rain will be touring to UK museums and galleries including Amgueddfa Cymru’s National Museum Cardiff (Cardiff, Wales) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee, Scotland). Further tour locations and dates are to be announced in the coming weeks.
Jenny Waldman, director, Art Fund, said:
“John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night To The Rain is set to be a powerful and immersive installation and I can’t wait to see it on the world stage at the Venice Biennale. I’m delighted that Art Fund is supporting the British Council to bring the work to museums and galleries across the UK, so audiences from Cardiff to Dundee can experience and be inspired by it.”
Listening All Night To The Rain continues artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s investigation into themes of memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change with a renewed focus on the act of listening and the sonic.
The exhibition, conceived as a single installation with eight interlocking and overlapping multi-screen sound and time-based works, is seen as a manifesto that encourages the idea of listening as activism and positions various progressive theories of acoustemology: how new ways of becoming are rooted in different forms of listening.
Encouraging visitors to experience the British Pavilion’s 19th century neoclassical building in a different way, Akomfrah’s commission interprets and transforms the fabric of the space in order to interrogate relics and monuments of colonial histories.
Open-ended in structure, the alliterative nature of the exhibition is reflective of the artist’s abiding interest in non-linear forms of storytelling and collage. Listening All Night To The Rain repositions the role of art in its ability to write history in unexpected ways, forming both critical and poetic connections between different geographies and time periods.
Skinder Hundal, Global Director of Arts at the British Council and Commissioner of the British Pavilion said:
“Partnering with the Art Fund to realise a UK tour for John Akomfrah’s Venice commission means that even more people get to experience this magical and aspirational work in their home locations across the UK. The excitement and joy to collaborate and support one of UK’s most important artists, of and for our time, is indeed a huge privilege as the Commissioner for the British Pavilion in 2024. I look forward to the transcending and ingenious expression from this living legend creating a world anew connecting with all cultures here in the UK and globally!”
Alongside Art Fund, the sponsors for Listening All Night To The Rain include returning headline partner Burberry, Richard Mille, Frieze and returning sponsor Christie’s.
Support for the exhibition also comes from LG Oled, Kavadrat and Unifor.
The exhibition is also made possible through the support of Lisson Gallery.
Bloomberg are digital partners for the British Pavilion in 2024.
Exhibition details
John Akomfrah’s British Council Commission for the British Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia will run from 20 April – 24 November 2024. For more information
visit https://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/listening-all-night
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