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‘Not even a pipe dream’: John Akomfrah represents Britain at Venice Biennale

Founder of Black Audio Film Collective says he would have laughed if someone had said he’d someday be in the UK pavilion

Britain’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world’s largest and most prominent art event, begins with video of delicate Holbein drawings from the Tudor court being washed over by the eddies of a stream and ends with the death of a British-Nigerian man, David Oluwale, who drowned in a Yorkshire river after being beaten by local police in 1969. When the Guardian revealed in 2018 that many elderly former immigrants from the Caribbean were being prevented from accessing healthcare in the UK, or threatened with deportation, Akomfrah said, referring to the Windrush scandal: “The minute you assume something’s resolved, that’s when that’s when it most bites you. This year’s invited curator, Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil, is the first from Latin America in the history of the event, which was founded in 1895, and the first who lives and works in the global south.

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