John Akomfrah: Listening All Night to the Rain

Curated by Tarini Malik

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary present Listening All Night to the Rain / Escuchando toda la noche la lluvia, a new exhibition by British artist Sir John Akomfrah CBE, specially conceived for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. On view from November 4, 2025 to February 8, 2026, the project reimagines Akomfrah’s most ambitious and experimental work to date, originally commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 60th International Venice Biennale (2024) where the work transformed the neoclassical pavilion with a cycle of “Cantos” that braid archival film, newly shot tableaux and immersive sound.

The exhibition takes its title from an 11th-century poem by Chinese writer Su Dongpo, written during his political exile, which reflects on the transitory nature of life. Through a series of immersive, multi-channel film and sound installations, Akomfrah continues his exploration of postcolonialism, ecology, and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the sonic. Flowing through the installation, water acts as the element that connects Akomfrah’s complex historical narratives, recalling both the crossings of displaced communities and the ways memory survives across continents and centuries. For Akomfrah, “the key metaphor, the key visual trope, is flooding. It speaks to climate change, but it’s also about rethinking what our past has been. Listening to your past is a good exercise.” 

For its Madrid premiere, Listening All Night to the Rain will have a special introduction with selected works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections featuring artists such as Joan Miró, Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein. Curated by Tarini Malik, this new layer situates John Akomfrah’s multi-screen installation within a broader artistic conversation about memory, identity, and rupture.

Layering archival images, voices, and sounds with newly filmed footage and staged tableaux, Akomfrah creates a kind of manifesto that positions listening as a form of activism. The installations summon histories of colonial resistance, environmental devastation, and migration, while offering space for reverie, memory, and monumentality. According to Malik, “This project can be seen as a culmination of the last four decades of John’s practice, but also marks a turning point in which he’s really pushing the boundaries of his chosen medium.”

The Cantos, structure and soul of the exhibition
At the heart of John Akomfrah’s exhibition is a sequence of “Cantos”—immersive video and sound movements that unfold like a contemporary epic. Each Canto is both a chapter in a global story and a meditation on how memory, sound, and water shape our understanding of history. Visitors in Madrid will have the opportunity to discover five of the original eight Cantos presented in Venice. 

Together, the Cantos invite audiences to slow down and listen; to voices from the past and present, to stories of displacement and resilience, and to the ways in which sound and water can carry memory across generations.

An introduction with Masters from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections
This exhibition will open with an introduction that traces shared formal and thematic currents with John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain. The surrealist symbolism of Joan Miró’s Catalan Peasant with a Guitar echoes Akomfrah’s diasporic figures and sonic traditions, while Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas Venice Was All Gold recalls the artist’s ruptures of cinematic time and critiques of empire. The staged abstraction of Oskar Schlemmer’s Formation Tri-Partition resonates with Akomfrah’s choreographed tableaux, just as Stuart Davis’ jazz-inflected Pochade mirrors his rhythmic editing. Collage takes on a political charge in Romare Bearden’s Sunday After Sermon, which parallels Akomfrah’s gathering of voices and images into forms of resilience. Finally, Yves Klein’s Dying Slave (after Michelangelo) connects with Akomfrah’s spectral presences, reimagining the body beyond linear history.

About John Akomfrah and TBA21
Sir John Akomfrah is internationally renowned for his art films and multi-screen video installations addressing urgent issues such as racial injustice, colonial legacies, diasporic identities, forced migration, and climate change. He began his practice in the early 1980s as a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), whose seminal first film, Handsworth Songs (1986), examined the 1985 uprisings in Birmingham and London. In recent years, Akomfrah has created ambitious multi-screen installations exhibited in leading museums and biennials worldwide. His achievements include the Artes Mundi Prize (2017) and representing Ghana at its first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019) with Four Nocturnes.

TBA21 first presented Akomfrah’s epic environmental film installation Purple (2017), which was shown in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid as part of the foundation’s long-standing interest in art and ecological thought. Since then, the British artist and the foundation established by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, and co-directed by Rosa Ferré and Markus Reymann, have found common ground in themes of climate crisis, migration, memory, and colonial legacies. TBA21’s program has long foregrounded decolonial narratives, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the human and non-human entanglements of environmental crisis. These concerns are precisely those that Akomfrah brings to the screen. Akomfrah’s call to embrace “listening as activism” resonates directly with that ethos.

In this sense, the Madrid exhibition is not just a tour stop of a Biennale project, but a natural extension of a relationship built on shared values. It places Akomfrah’s vision within a broader cultural ecosystem where art is mobilized to address the crises of our time (climate emergency, racial injustice, the persistence of colonial structures) and to imagine more sustainable and inclusive futures. 

Listening All Night to the Rain was originally commissioned by the British Council for the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. The work was co-commissioned by Lisson Gallery and Smoking Dogs Films. Its presentation in Madrid is co-produced by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21, with the support of the British Council.