An exhibition (not quite) made for Liverpool
John Akomfrah's Listening All Night to the Rain opens at the Walker Art Gallery
It’s been a busy week of exhibition openings and announcements in Liverpool. At the Walker Art Gallery, Sir John Akomfrah launched three video works from his Venice Biennial 2024 exhibit Listening All Night To The Rain (more on that from him below) and Gender Stories, which uses art to explore how the social construct of gender has changed over centuries and cultures. I will write about this properly in another edition of Stored Honey.
Over at Bluecoat, screenings of Steve McQueen’s art film Grenfell are running until Sunday 21 June, in partnership with Tate Liverpool. And on Friday, Tate Liverpool also revealed Asad Raza will create the first major commission for the Art Hall, a new space at the heart of the gallery when it reopens in 2027. Raza is known for immersing audiences in multi-sensory, participatory experiences - he installed a tennis-like game in a deconsecrated 16th century church in Milan and rerouted a section of Frankfurt’s Main River through the Kunsthalle Portikus gallery - so this will be one to look forward to.
This is a free post for everyone but if you do decide to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber then you will receive lots of extra content including a monthly guide to the best of what’s on in Liverpool, Manchester and across the North West, as well as Meet the Creator features, curators’ picks of 5 things to see in their venue and the Stored Honey podcast. Either way - thank you for reading.
‘It feels like I’m doing something to thank the city’
You can hear John Akomfrah’s installation at the Walker Art Gallery long before you see it - its watery sounds mingling with bird song from St John’s Gardens as you walk up William Brown Street.
While it seems the whole art world is at the Venice Biennale this month, a little piece of the city’s 2024 festival has come here to Liverpool - three Cantos from Akomfrah’s multi-channel work Listening All Night To The Rain. The first, featuring imagery and voices of Global Majority people, is displayed on the gallery’s portico, reflecting its original presentation on the façade of the British Pavilion in Venice.
Inside the Walker, two rooms have been transformed into black boxes, where you can sit quietly and immerse yourself in the layered soundscapes, archival footage and newly filmed material of Cantos IV and V. Canto IV places together imagery about the Elizabethan exploration of the New World alongside that of modern day container shipping, migrant vessels and sea pollution to consider the structural forces behind climate colonialism and forced migration. Canto V explores mass migration and the diaspora in Britain, focussing on the Windrush generation.
“The whole of the pavilion was about water as metaphor or metanym for memory,” says Akomfrah.
“I wanted to find a way of talking about the things that both connect people, and events and histories, as well as what keeps them separate. Each room had what we called a canton, a song, and they ranged across different histories. The bits we’ve got here are the segments or chapters or songs which are more specifically about the Isles and the histories in the Isles.”
Despite being created for the Venice Bienniale, the pieces could almost have been made with Liverpool in mind, he says.
“These two [inside the Walker] are are in some ways doing maritime history, about journey, shipping, the making and building of ships, how those then connect this side of the world, Europe, to other parts of the world - and Liverpool is quintessentially a maritime construct,” says Akomfrah.
“They’re both also about the coming of multi-culture in a very broad sense, not just to do with ethnic identity. From the first time I got here in the late 70s, I realised there were people here whose parents, not even grandparents, were from Ireland or Wales or Scotland. It’s a really interesting place in that sense, because it feels like from its very beginnings, it’s always been a kind of mixed place, with people from different parts of the island coming here because of its maritime history.
“They’re not [about Liverpool], but if I said they were you wouldn’t doubt it because there are things in them that connect with this city and its origins and its futures.”
Akomfrah wants visitors to Listening All Night To The Rain to “just experience things”: “The main thing for me at the moment is that once you’ve discovered your identity that’s just the beginning of the journey, you have to connect that to all the other identities around you and figure out how we’re going to live together. Part of that is sharing the ways in which histories and identities overlap.”
As a dedicated Liverpool FC fan “since John Barnes signed in the 80s”, Akomfrah has been a regular visitor to the city. He has made and exhibited work here many times - his documentary Riot for Channel 4 in 2000 explored the turmoil in Toxteth in 1981 through the eyes of residents, police and community activists; The Unfinished Conversation (2012), tracing the life and work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, premiered at Liverpool Biennial 2012.
“It’s good to have a solo show here because it feels like I’m doing something, finally, to thank the city for all that I’ve taken from it over the last 40 years,” he says.
John Akomfrah: Listening All Night To The Rain is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until Monday 31 August.
See your work featured in Stored Honey
If you’re an artist, actor, theatre maker, curator, director or producer, I’d love to hear more about your work. You can submit details of an exhibition, performance or cultural event by sending details and an image to laura@lauracdavis.com. If you would like to take part in Stored Honey’s regular Meet the Artist feature, please answer the questions in this Q&A or if you don’t like filling in forms I can send you the questions via email.
In case you missed it
Now booking
Charlie Brooks and Joe McFadden will head the cast of the multi-award-winning stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time when it comes to Storyhouse, Chester, in Spring 2027.
Chris Boon is gifted with a brilliant mind for numbers but unsettled by the unpredictability of people and everyday life. When a neighbour’s dog is discovered killed, Chris comes under suspicion. Determined to prove their innocence, Chris becomes both detective and suspect, drawn into a mystery that grows darker and more complex with every clue uncovered. It’s at Storyhouse from Tuesday 16 March to Saturday 20 March 2027.
Thank you for reading the 179th edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed this week’s I would really appreciate it if you tap the ❤️ button to help it get shown to more people.
I’m off now to figure out if I can squeeze an exhibition into a short work trip to London.
Have a great week,
Laura
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